Farewell to medical aid tax credits

JOHANNESBURG - Medical aid tax credits will be redirected to launch the National Health Insurance, though it faces constitutional questions and concerns about funding, corruption, and mismanagement.

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Nicholas Crisp, Deputy DG for National Health Insurance, says this idea has been discussed for years, shifting funds from wealthier individuals into the public system.

Crisp said, "the challenges we have is that neither of these systems, the funding of these system is efficient, it's not effective and we spend a lot of money considering the poor outcomes we get."

We need to be far more organized and far more operated in a cohesive way if we are gong to receive outcomes for everybody in the country, the tax credits are just one method and this was discussed several years ago that instead of giving a couple of Rands a month to wealthier people, middle class, and upper class people if that money was moved into the public system we would have additional money to enable the public sector to fix some of the things that are broken at the moment."

"On the contrary, what we saw last year is the increase in tax credit to the private sector while the minister cut the budget in the public sector that doesn’t make sense as a country to operate in that way."