‘I stand by my words’: Limpopo Health MEC says SADC countries must pay for their citizens

Limpopo Health MEC Dr Phophi Ramathuba is not backing down in her fight for SADC countries to pay medical expenses for their citizens who receive treatment in South Africa.

The MEC was responding to the backlash she received following a video of her “explaining” to a foreign national patient why she should pay for the medical procedure she had just received at a public hospital.

Ramathuba has been criticised by some for how she handled the matter, while others praised her for “finally telling the truth”.

In an interview with the SABC on Wednesday, Ramathuba said she stood by everything she said in the video, further explaining she did not “attack” the patient.

“We did not attack the patient,” she said.

Ramathuba told the SABC that she appreciated the attention the video has received from South Africans because “the already overburdened healthcare system is now coming to its knees”.

“South Africa has a constitution and Section 27 is very clear that we shall never deny anyone emergency healthcare services and as a province, including myself, we stick by that. On a daily basis we admit foreign nationals, illegal or legal, they’re there receiving healthcare services and we’ve never raised or complained about that,” explained Ramathuba.

“But being a rural province which is under-resourced, we’re having serious challenges when it comes to the backlog of surgical procedures. We came up with this initiative that says ‘rural health matters’ and with this initiative, we’re very selfish about it because its aim is to make sure that the people in the rural part of Limpopo, the poorest of the poor, have access to specialist care. They’ve been sitting for years with a surgical backlog and not being attended to.”

Since its inception two years ago, doctors have operated on more than 4,700 cases. However, said Ramathuba, the backlog of the surgical procedures is not improving.

“The people who come and do these operations are not necessarily coming from the province. We’ve got professors from other parts of the country and even overseas and we go and recruit them. They’re coming at no cost but the only issue is that most of them are coming originally from Limpopo and that’s why they become biased and they do agree and understand when I plead with them to come and help me clear the surgical backlog of our brothers and sisters in the province,” said Ramathuba.

“What we have noted, why we’re not even making a dent on this surgical backlog is because there has been abuse of this project by illegal foreign nationals. I stand by the video’s content because I need to give that understanding to say we’re not doing anything to our surgical backlog because people are abusing this system.

“When they hear that the MEC is coming to this district with specialist care they leave their country, enter South Africa illegally and come to our hospitals. The doctors who operate on them, for ethical reasons, even though the constitution will cover the doctors, don’t refuse to operate on them. But that specific South African citizen who we did this project for is unable to get operated on because they are still flooding our initiative.”

Ramathuba said there was another video in which a patient explains how he was in an accident in Harare, Zimbabwe, and was told by his brother, who is in South Africa, about Limpopo health’s initiative, and decided to come to the country for a free surgical procedure.

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“I’m not going to wait for the NHI to tell the illegal foreign nationals that you will not be able to get access to elective healthcare services if you are not documented. We have been talking about this on national level for years, calling to be reimbursed as the government because SADC partners are willing to pay private hospitals in these countries millions but they are not willing to reimburse the state hospital which are attending to the millions of their citizens. So we have reached a level where we need to start educating the patients themselves and ask them about the fairness of it,” explained Ramathuba.

“We have operated on her and we won’t stop operating on them but they must pay. While we can classify legal foreign nationals, we can’t classify illegal foreign nationals, that is why you must pay the full amount.

“Our system is already overburdened, we come up with programmes and initiatives to address our challenges but they are being abused and manipulated and we are not winning. The reality is that South Africans are competing for these limited resources with illegal migrants. My responsibility as the Health MEC in Limpopo is to make sure people in this province live a long and healthy life.”

Watch the full interview below: