NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE BILL PASSED BY NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE BILL PASSED BY NATIONAL ASSEMBLY

• 13 June 2023
• Parliament
• SA Legal Academy

Please note: A link to the minutes of the National Assembly sitting at which the Bill was passed is now available and can be found in the penultimate paragraph of this report, with a media statement from Parliament itself.

The National Assembly has passed a ‘B’ version of the National Health Insurance Bill, which will be sent to the NCOP for concurrence.

As SA Legal Academy has already reported, the Bill seeks to establish a national health insurance fund that, once fully operationalised, is expected to:

• provide ‘universal protection against financial risk’
• equitably distribute the financial burden entailed, and
• facilitate equitable access to quality health care services that are efficiently administered in a well governed health care system.

The Bill now reflects amendments made by the National Assembly’s Health Committee after deliberations that began in August 2019 and continued intermittently until the end of May 2023.

Opening a second reading debate on the Bill, Health Minister Joe Phaahla said its overarching objective is to ‘pool (the) resources of those who can only contribute to the fiscus through indirect means such as VAT and … and those of us who are able (to make) and are already making fragmented contributions into 81 different schemes’. The intention is that, over time, these pooled resources will be used to purchase services for every level of healthcare available at state facilities and from private providers.

• Bill’s ‘B’ version 
• Health Minister’s speech
• Parliament’s media statement
• minutes of the sitting at which the Bill was passed
• SA Legal Academy article on committee report

At the time of writing, no minutes were available of the House sitting concerned. However, according to a YouTube recording (with voting beginning 3 hours and 07 minutes into the proceedings), 200 of the 205 members who voted in favour of the Bill were ANC representatives. Of the 125 members who voted against the Bill, most were representatives of the DA, EFF, IFP and FF Plus. There were no abstentions.

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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