Parliament delays decision on whether to read NHI submissions - Medical Brief 282 - 05 December 2019

Parliament delays decision on whether to read NHI submissions - Medical Brief 282 - 05 December 2019

Medical Brief 282 - 05 December 2019

"The National Assembly’s Health Committee will only consider how to manage the vast volume of written submissions it has received in response to the National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill in February, its chair, Sibongiseni Dhlomo, is quoted in Business Day as saying. At issue is whether MPs scrutinise each of the hundreds of thousands of submissions themselves or outsource some of the work to a third party.

Parliament’s rules are silent on the issue, according to University of Cape Town constitutional law expert Pierre de Vos, and it has recently faced controversy over outsourcing the submissions received in response to its constitutional review of land expropriation without compensation. Dhlomo said he did not know precisely how many written submissions on the NHI Bill had been received by the 29 November deadline last week, but Parliament indicated on 23 October that it had already received more than 100,000 written submissions. The Democratic Alliance (DA) said last week it had collected another 87,000 submissions.

In a parallel process, the committee is holding public hearings in the provinces and has already toured Mpumalanga, Northern Cape, Limpopo and KZN, and on Sunday wrapped up in the Eastern Cape. Dhlomo said the committee planned to complete its public hearings in the remaining four provinces early in 2020, finishing up in the Western Cape. It would consider the written submissions in Parliament’s first session in 2020, which will begin after President Cyril Ramaphosa delivers his State-of-the-Nation address, scheduled for 13 February."

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