Will forcing MPs to use public healthcare make it better?

Another day, and yet another suggestion from ActionSA that public officials should be forced to use public services, as if that will somehow make those services better.

If it’s not public officials being forced to use public transport, it’s that they must send their kids to public schools.

The latest from the Herman Mashaba camp is that public servants should use public healthcare services.

One can nearly hear the internal laughter of Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi at the idea (one that he has publicly supported). Presumably, he has no problem supporting it, given that he’s doubling down on the National Health Insurance (NHI). It would be pretty silly to advocate for the eventual blending of private and public healthcare, but demand that his ilk continue to be allowed to use private healthcare.

Perhaps that was the strategy of ActionSA all along: getting Motsoaledi to admit a personal lust toward private healthcare. If that was the reason, it’s gone down as well as a quirky Helen Zille tweet.

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However, the actual idea of forcing public officials to use public services to create some sort of political investment incentive is not just stupid, it’s divorced from any South African context. Maybe that would work in a country where there’s some sort of honour, even if it’s among thieves, but this is South Africa. This is the country where we dare not even introduce self-service checkouts at grocers because we know how disastrous that would be.

So not only do we have to embrace the imposed moniker of “Plastique?” but we also have to accept that for the right people, the public purse will get them anything from a fire pool to a trip to the Cannes Film Festival.

How is it that despite the Department of Health never having any money, there are still so many awesome doctors in public hospitals? There may be no medicine for the plebeians, but the lights are still on, and if somebody important or a friend of a friend gets rushed in, throwing somebody out of the ICU to make way for them wouldn’t be an issue.

The problem has never been that we don’t have the facilities to deal with sick people. The problem has always been that we don’t have enough facilities to deal with all the sick people who are not politically important.

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I don’t think Motsoaledi cares which hospital he ends up in. He could be in a rural clinic in Limpopo, but if they had to fly in the best medical team and equipment, best believe they’ll do it. Whether they’d do that for Sam Nje is less likely.  

You’re dealing with a class of people who can walk into any school and bump their kids straight into the classroom on the day school starts, while the rest of us have to apply in utero just to get on the waiting list. This is why forcing them to use public services is hardly going to make the public services any better.

Remember that strange aunty in your family? The one whose house had a great lounge that nobody was allowed in because it had to be preserved in case the Queen, Nelson Mandela and the Pope decided to come visit — simultaneously.

That’s all you’ll create when you force public servants to use public services: the white elephant room that will remain vacant in case the deputy minister of transport gets hit by a taxi nearby.

It’s a sad state of affairs that one feels the need to incentivise public servants to serve the public. It’s an even sadder state of affairs when trying to create those incentives is a losing battle. Maybe the answer should be to appoint public servants who are enthusiastic about public service in the first place. I wonder if they thought about that.

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