Tamar Kahn
14 October 2008
Johannesburg — More consultation and debate was needed before the government introduced new measures to regulate prices in the private healthcare sector, Health Minister Barbara Hogan said yesterday.
"I wouldn't want to rush anything like that with undue haste," she told Business Day in an interview on the sidelines of an international AIDS vaccine conference.
Her comments stand in stark contrast to her predecessor, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who was accused by the private healthcare industry of attempting to push the controversial National Health Amendment Bill through P arliament without sufficient consultation with major players.
The bill proposes introducing a central bargaining system for annual price negotiations between medical schemes and healthcare service providers such as hospitals, doctors and specialists, with a government-appointed arbiter to break deadlocks in negotiations.
Parliament's portfolio committee on health has indicated that it will not process the bill in the current parliamentary session. Hogan said healthcare pricing was a global concern, but regulation needed to be carefully thought through.
While the government had succeeded in lowering pharmaceutical manufacturers' prices, the overall cost of private healthcare had continued to rise, she said. "I'd prefer a regulatory regime not endlessly engaged in litigation, one that works like clockwork. "
The government's medicine pricing regulations, first introduced in 2004, have yet to be fully implemented because the health department is still tied up in a legal row with retail pharmacists over the markups they can levy on the medicines they dispense. While the Constitutional Court has upheld the government's right to regulate pharmacists' dispensing fees, the two sides are still locked in a bitter row over the size of this fee. The parties are due back in court later this month. As a result of the dispute, the potential savings from lower medicine prices have not been fully realised by consumers. More litigation is likely if the National Health Amendment Bill is passed in its current form. Private hospitals have already indicated they will not let the bill's passage go unchallenged.
Hogan gave a frank assessment of SA's HIV/AIDS crisis to the scientists and policy makers attending yesterday's opening of the AIDS vaccine conference, urging them to pursue their research into finding an effective vaccine against the disease.
"There can't be any more important meeting at this time," she said, emphasising the need for new ways to prevent the spread of HIV.
"SA is at the epicentre of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, with an estimated 5,7-million people living with the disease. The annual national surveys on HIV and syphilis we started conducting in 1990 suggest we had at least 10 years of rapid spread of the disease in our communities, especially among women and the youth," she said.
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