ABSTRACT
South Africa's health care is provided by the government health sector, funded by taxpayers, and a private sector that is financed in various ways. The government health sector is under strain, suffering from shortages of medicines, poor and unclean facilities, poor service delivery, rude personnel and a shortage of doctors and staff. This chapter examines the threat to health-care delivery posed by South Africa's recent health legislation, particularly the National Health Act 2003, and offers suggestions for an alternative health-care dispensation in which all patients, rich and poor would receive high-quality private care. Government health department planners not only do not know what will be invented and when; they also do not know who will do the inventing. If government's health-care plans continue in the direction of nationalisation, which appears to be the ultimate goal, South Africans will lose their world-class private health-care firms.
