Alex van der Heever and Jonathan Broomberg.

My problem with his hypothesis is that it seems based on a number of highly speculative and emotional assumptions, rather than dealing with the nuts and bolts of a momentously make-or-break policy issue .

Socialist commentators nearly all assume that private sector is inherently wasteful and inefficient, that centralised Government bureaucracy is the way to go and see the NHI under a Government single payer model. One  could argue that Gems is the fastest growing medical aid  confined to public Sector membership What’s not said is that Government underwrites, promotes and subsidises Gems to a huge extent (with tax payer money and using private sector DSP and administrators Momentum/ Medcheme’s AFA)

Based on history, that we have seen a steady decline in Health standards despite deployment of substantial percentage of GDP on Health, so we hopefully must agree that the present NDoH would not be able to run the NHI.
If we consider  parastatal type model and then look at existing parastatals  such as Eskom, Transnet, SABC, Bafana Bafana and SAA, whose balance sheets  are soaked in red ink; plagued by chronic mismanagement, corruption and infighting; requiring  multi Rbillion bail outs by the taxpayers.

I append an article from the BBC on their British neoliberal take on Quangos’  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4255709.stm
Despite Oxfam and Prof Mooneys unswerving faith in the efficiency of Government service delivery model, a RSA Government run NHI would cause a  further lemming like migration of health professionals to Australia’s  relatively well run utopian PPP Medicare NHS.
Terry Higginson