Political parties largely silent on major health issues
Less than half of the 20 political parties asked about how they would deal with key health challenges provided answers in response to a call by TAC. Those parties that did respond provided little in the way of solutions to problems such as medicine stock-outs, cervical cancer and reviving provincial AIDS councils.
On March 7, TAC released a health manifesto posing questions to political parties on 11 health issues such as patent law reform, tuberculosis in prisons and the National Health Insurance (NHI).
Although TAC had originally asked politicians to submit response by 14 March, the civil society extended this deadline until noon 18 March. Despite the extension, only eight of the 20 political parties invited to respond to questions submitted responses to TAC.
Parties who responded were:
- AgangSA,
- Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO),
- Democratic Alliance (DA),
- Freedom Front Plus (FF+),
- Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP),
- Pan Africanist Movement (PAM),
- Patriotic Alliance (PA), and
- the United Democratic Movement.
The African National Congress (ANC), Congress of the People and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) were among the parties that chose not to respond, according to TAC, who has said it will still collect late replies should parties submit them.
The ANC also failed to attend the Guateng launch of the manifesto earlier this week in Orange Farm where representatives from the DA, AgangSA and the National Freedom Party fielded questions from audience members.
In a written statement, DA leader in the Gauteng legislature Jack Bloom called the ANC’s lack of attendance at the 500-person event “a display of stunning ignorance.” Only the South African Communist Party attended TAC’s Mpumalanga launch, according to TAC’s Mpumalanga Deputy Secretary Nelisiwe Malinga.
“We want (politicians) to promise what change they are going to bring about and say why we should vote for these political parties,” Malinga said.
According to the TAC’s Head of Policy Marcus Low, the manifesto had been aimed at bringing politicians closer to the realities of everyday people.
“This is about bridging the gap between politics and the needs of the people on the ground,” Low said. “If parties don’t engage, then we can’t do that.”
At the time of going to print, neither the ANC nor the EFF had responded to questions regarding if or when they would be responding to the manifesto.
Few concrete proposals for change
[quote float=”right”]”This is about bridging the gap between politics and the needs of the people on the ground. If parties don’t engage, then we can’t do that.”
Responses to the more than 30 questions outline in the manifesto were largely short affirmations of commitments to public goods such as expanded HIV treatment and cervical cancer, and condemnation of societal ills like corruption and medicine outages.
Few questions elicited specific recommendations to address shortcomings however the DA did take a page from activists’ playbooks in proposing greater oversight of prison health systems by inspectors who are not funded by the Department of Corrections. The DA also proposed that district and provincial AIDS councils evaluations form part of Health MECs performance reviews to address what the AZAPO called were “virtually dysfunctional” bodies.
Parties were divided on the NHI, with the DA, AgangSA and PAM responding that they supported the move in theory but that the NHI needed to be amended. The PA and the FF+ said that they did not support NHI. PAM said it did not support the universal health insurance in its current form and proposed the nationalisation of private hospitals instead.
“PAM does not support National Health Insurance, whatever that means,” wrote PAM representatives. “We believe that health must be the sole responsibility of the state and that private hospitals must be nationalised to serve the health needs of all citizens.”
The DA, PAM AgangSA and the FF+ also came out against the current Protection of State Information Bill, also dubbed “the Secrecy Bill.” These parties, alongside the PA, also opposed the creation of statutory media tribunals.
According to Low, TAC will be accepting comments from parties who did not respond to the initial call. – Health-e News Service.
Read what parties said about the NHI
An edited version of this article first appeared in the 20 March edition of the Pretoria News.
Author
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Political parties largely silent on major health issues
by lauralopez, Health-e News
March 20, 2014
Related
Quarter of surveyed health facilities report stock outs
Almost 25 percent of health facilities surveyed nationally have gone without HIV or tuberculosis (TB) medicines at least once in the last year, according to preliminary survey results released this week.
One pill a day to keep HIV at bay for thousands of sex workers
One pill a day will soon help keep thousands of sex workers HIV-free as South Africa is expected to announce today that it will provide antiretrovirals to thousands HIV-negative sex workers in a bid to keep them HIV free.
Reprieve expected for dental assistants
The Health Professionals Council of South Africa (HPCSA) is expected to announce a reprieve for thousands of unregistered dental hygienists nationwide just weeks ahead of a change in policy that could have left many open to criminal prosecution.