POLITICAL parties and civil society organisations have welcomed the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, ruling that Certificates of Need (CoNs) in the National Health Insurance (NHI) Act were unconstitutional.
The act uses CoNs to determine whether health practitioners may establish or acquire a practice or provide health services.
According to the judgment handed down on Wednesday, the government would have the power to determine where medical practitioners may practise in terms of Sections 36 to 40 of the NHI Act, but these were ruled invalid in their entirety.
Trade union Solidarity, which brought the case to court together with other applicants, said it had achieved a major breakthrough in its fight against the NHI when a core pillar on which the states centralisation of health care rests was declared unconstitutional.
This judgment is a major blow to the total NHI idea as the principle of central management is a core pillar of the NHI Act itself. A more extensive consequence of this ruling with regard to the certificate of need is that parts of the NHI Act are now probably also illegal in principle, said Solidaritys CEO, Dr Dirk Hermann.
