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The announcement today by the Minister of Health Comrade Aaron Motsoaledi is long overdue on the release of the Government Green Paper on National Health Insurance (NHI). This is in line with the call made by the SACP through a resolution in the 12th Congress in 2007; the 2007 Red October Campaign; the 2009 Red October Campaign and the 2009 2nd Special National Congress, where we called for a sustainable, affordable and accessible public health system.

The release of the document also gives us an opportunity as a nation to pay a particular attention to the fact that from 2002 the life expectancy of females in South Africa has declined drastically. If this pattern continues without any interruption, it means that the life expectancy of female South Africans will be 43 by 2014, a year government has targeted as the year by which we should halved unemployment and poverty.

Whilst the document will still be opened for engagement, we are still convinced that there is a need to move faster to overhauling the economic policies, aimed at helping the country to build amongst others an equitable, accessible and affordable health system. This should also address the yawning gap between the public and private health systems, the former catering for predominantly the black majority and the latter for the whites and the layer of black elite.

The SACP has noted as early as 2007 that in many ways the colonialism of a special type health inequalities are daily being reproduced despite some advances made by government in making health care accessible and affordable for the majority of our people. Another dimension of the SACP health campaign is to effectively interface with, and mobilise the thousands of community health care givers, the majority of whom are women both in the urban and rural areas. This layer of health care givers can be mobilised into a formidable motive force for the transformation of our public and community health care.

The SACP calls upon communities, workers, community health care workers, to visit hospitals and community clinics to assess the state of these institutions, hold community and workers’ red forums, such steps will assist us as we make our contributions to the Green Paper on the National Health Insurance (NHI) which will be printed from tomorrow in terms of the statement released by Government.

Whilst we welcome the release of the document, we will continue with our campaign on health which demands the following:
 

• Well-resourced public hospitals with basic medication and other facilities.
• Functioning community health clinics with staff and medication.
• Accelerated implementation of government’s comprehensive HIV/AIDS programmes.
• Improvement of the wages, conditions of service of all health workers, including community health workers

We will furthermore seek to create structures to strengthen people’s participation in the transformation of our public health system and its institutions. This would include assessing the effectiveness of, amongst others, hospital boards and clinic committees in order to ensure that our communities, led by alliance structures of the ground, do indeed participate in these institutions as required by the National Health Act.

The bedrock for the success of the NHI will be the working class itself – hence our call for its voice to be heard during the consultations. There can be no transformation of our public health system without the organized working class being at the head of this effort.