The Deputy Director General of National Health Insurance, Dr. Nicholas Crisp, stated in a Business Tech staff reporter’s article that the NHI might end up being the next SARS or ACSA instead of the next Eskom or SAA. He therefore boasts that the NHI might be a huge success instead of a miserable failure.

“Can we fix what is wrong?” is a poignant question posed by the good Dr. Crisp. He then responds to his query with a resounding “Yes We Can!” in typical “Barak Obama” fashion. With enthusiasm, he asserts, “We have done it before. “This country has good organisations,” he says, citing SARS and ACSA as the best examples.

Before we move on to his comparison, let us take a look at Dr. Crisp’s prediction for the NHI and examine its potential effects from a logical perspective.

Dr. Crisp correctly highlights the disparity between private and public healthcare. He views it as an issue from the standpoint of the general public for the following reasons:

First, talented physicians and nurses are leaving the public sector for the “lucrative private sector,” making it impossible for the public sector to retain them. He imagines that the NHI will resolve that issue in some way. He appears to be unaware of the fact that the NHI will not be able to retain qualified medical professionals for the same reason—as they leave for more lucrative jobs abroad, leaving the NHI short-staffed and destroying, rather than improving, healthcare in this nation for all.

Second, he laments that only a small percentage of the population is served by private healthcare, which is mainly unregulated, especially in terms of pricing. Maybe he ought to have some of the nation’s most renowned economists explain the economics of private healthcare to him. Market forces govern private healthcare, and those who profit from it pay exorbitant premiums for those benefits.

He goes on to reiterate the ridiculous idea that the private healthcare industry has devolved into a “FREE FOR ALL” system with hundreds of plans and packages that only a select few can take advantage of. These extremely “expensive” packages are anything but “FREE,” and they are only for those who can “AFFORD” them.

He continues by listing the structural inefficiencies and complications in public healthcare, as well as the fact that corruption has become rampant. He declares that the public health sector has “become inefficient, delivers no value for money, and provides poor quality of care” as a result of these factors.

The NHI will extend this subpar public healthcare situation to all healthcare, which is something that the good doctor is blind to. He and others who support the NHI argue that a failing public healthcare system cannot be combined with a smaller, more effective private healthcare system and expect the successful model to replace the failing one. In practice, it never works that way; instead, the failure will simply spread, overtaking the successful and bringing the entire system down to mediocrity and further disintegration.

In addition to destroying universal access to quality healthcare, the NHI will spread a fatal economic failure disease throughout the nation. The economic outlook is already bleak, and this will be the final straw.

Let us now focus on Dr. Crisp’s comparisons, which suggest that the NHI may not end up like Eskom or SAA but rather could become the next SARS or ACSA. We should also look at the NHI’s potential economic effects on the nation.

Comparing the NHI to SARS is like comparing financial assets to fruitcakes. Although a comparison is impossible, there are some similarities between the proposed NHI and the successful SARS in terms of how the South African economy will develop in the future.

There are those who argue that SARS is operating too effectively. One of the main reasons that wealthy taxpayers are escaping our shores is SARS, or its increasingly aggressive tax collection business. ACSA is being used as an escape route by those who are escaping. Regretfully, they will not be taking off on the SAA. The less this article discusses Eskom, the better.

SARS only collects taxes that are turned over to the government; it does not sell anything or have any products of its own. Its customers are not given a choice in tax products, and doing business with it can lead to fines and legal action. SARS is succeeding because it only needs to enforce and streamline its collection procedures.

The tax laws that support SARS are arguably the only ones that are strictly enforced in South Africa, but only at what the commissioner refers to as “low hanging fruit”—fruit higher up the branch, especially that which is attached to the vine’s core, is less strictly enforced!

Because the actual tax base is a small percentage of the working population, which is a small percentage of the total population, South Africa is among the most taxed countries in the world.

Due to the frustration of wealthy and upper-middle-class taxpayers, the trickle out of South Africa is becoming a flood.

As Dr. Crisp noted, SARS is “doing fine,” but the state, which benefits from all of its hard work, is not doing so well. The NHI will not treat the disease that has developed as a result of corruption and wastefulness. Simply because the government does not care how it spends the money or bring criminal charges against those who steal it, the moral agreement between the taxpayer and the tax recipient—the government of the day—is experiencing a growing mental breakdown.

The state is practically bankrupt as well. The money it can extract from an already-squeezed population, a deteriorating business environment, and the rising cancer of unemployment is greatly outweighed by its justifiable expenses, theft, waste, conceited projects, state-owned enterprise bailouts, etc.

Even though South Africans are typically upbeat and hopeful, a society that ignores reality will eventually become schizophrenic and unable to see the forest for the trees of its destruction. Financial experts and economists frequently tell us that things always get back to normal, and in a normal world, they usually do. The world is no longer normal, though, in the traditional sense of the word. Human society is on the verge of disintegrating on all fronts. Collapse was always a very real possibility that is rapidly turning into a given given the way humans have run the world politically, economically, and socially over the past century.