MEDIA STATEMENT
BY THE
INKATHA FREEDOM PARTY
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IFP MEDIA
STATEMENT BY: 4 March 2008 IFP spokesperson on Health, Dr Ruth Rabinowitz MP today said: "The Department of Health's latest ambitious goal is the intention to provide dual therapy to mothers with HIV." "Like the rest of South Africa's health policies it is an ideal that is overtaken by an ever more disturbing reality." "The IFP believes that none of the measures adopted by the Department within the constraints of our current constitutional dispensation and health policy can succeed. We maintain that: * Health must be depoliticised. * The system must be decentralised. * The public service must become a bulk purchaser of care from the private sector to increase standards and reduce prices." "The regulation of health care must be simplified and all services must be monitored by health ombudspersons with defaulters held accountable to the law." "Charters change nothing!" "Centralised interference has wrecked the public sector and is eroding the private. Appallingly the Health Professions Council operated with a deficit of R6, 8 million last year. This year it will increase fees again by 10% and at the same time professionals have lost the right to vote for their representatives on the Council." "Over regulation too has not achieved its goal with medical schemes and contributes to increasing hospital costs." "Socialist policies are not the mechanism through which to cope with dual therapy, HIV, TB or the ever mushrooming number of mentally ill people in our country, where infant mortality is on the rise and the average age of death steadily wanes."
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