BusinessDay reports that according to a Department of Health (DOH) presentation to MPs on Tuesday, the government may not need to raise new taxes for National Health Insurance (NHI) for almost another decade.

NHI is the government’s plan for universal health coverage, which aims to ensure all eligible patients have access to healthcare services that are free at the point of delivery, paid for by a government-controlled NHI Fund. Addressing parliament’s standing committee on appropriations, the DOH’s deputy director general for NHI, Nicholas Crisp, sketched a picture of the potential sources of funding for NHI over 15 years to 2037/38, but stopped short of setting out the detailed mechanisms required to implement these measures. If all the potential funding sources were realised, the total amount raised for NHI by 2037/38 would be R458bn, according to Crisp’s presentation.

The first step would be to phase out medical scheme tax credits and redirect conditional grants and provincial health budgets to the NHI Fund. Crisp said tax credits would first be phased out for high-income earners, but the threshold has yet to be determined. The next stage would involve scrapping the medical scheme subsidies provided by the state to civil servants, redirecting the funds spent by correctional services on health, and moving the money that currently resides in the Road Accident Fund and Compensation Fund to NHI. Last of all would be raising new taxes, which the presentation suggested would only start in 2033/34. Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has said in court papers that NHI could take 10 to 15 years to implement.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Tamar Kahn at BusinessDay (subscriber access only)

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