MEDIA STATEMENT
BY THE
INKATHA FREEDOM PARTY
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IFP MEDIA
STATEMENT BY: 3 March 2008 While the state of health services in the public domain continues to deteriorate with flight of nurses, doctors, pharmacists, physiotherapists and virtually all other trained personnel, the Minister of Health seeks to distract attention from these failings by focusing on the high costs in the private sector. Ironically many of these are imposed by regulations that encourage conniving and corruption while doing little to improve quality of care or access to care, the Minister's latest stated mission. The chickens born of the centralised vision of the original White Paper, that viewed Health as the socialist arm of government, are now coming home to roost. In order that the money allocated to health in the public sector should correct the many failings in public health services, the IFP recommends fundamental changes in policy. We have and continue to propose that government must, *Improve accountability through decentralisation - this must be accompanied by clarity on who has authority to do what and who holds the purse strings. Health governance should be from the bottom up within frameworks to ensure accountability. * Raise the level of service in the public sector by putting the private sector to work for the large majority of people, through public-private partnerships that go to best bidders and not to best buddies. Hospitals, clinics and mobile units, training of nurses and doctors and distribution of medicines, should fall within this framework. * Allow the public sector to compete openly in the private market, to bring about reduction in all health costs. * Don't concern public service health administrators with bureaucratic over-regulation concerning Certificates of Need, price fixing, foreign doctors and medical schemes. They should rather be concerned with upholding standards, preventing corruption and attracting nurses and doctors through offering appropriate incentives. * The department should act to regulate - for the sake of safety, efficacy and transparency, - medical devices, food labels, complimentary medicines and traditional healers. * The Financial and Fiscal Commission (not the Health Department) should regulate Medical Schemes. They should be required to be far more transparent, clearly exposing the division between medical administrators that profit from the schemes and Medical Schemes, which are by law non profit entities. * There should be independent health ombudspersons and the statutory Councils for all health professionals should be democratically elected and vigorously independent for the sake of transparency and accountability to the public, not to the Minister of Health. This above framework would remove perverse incentives and contradictory regulations, such as the Board of Health Care Funders versus the Competition Commission. It would prevent the private sector misleading the public through marketing and the public sector doing so through populism. It would provide a far stronger health system to cope with HIV/AIDS, TB, STD's, vulnerable children and our mushrooming population of mentally disturbed persons.
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