Hon Chairperson, allow me to respond to the hon De Villiers on the ANC-led government transforming the health care sector. Currently, health care is one of the five priorities of this administration. This is because we are responding to the need to make access to quality health care available to all citizens irrespective of socioeconomic status, race, gender, geography and other characteristics that were once used during the apartheid era to discriminate against our people.
You have just reminded me that the big hospital is the Baragwanath Hospital. Then we have two general hospitals in town - one for blacks and the other one for whites. As a black person, should you be involved in an accident in town, you would be taken to the Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto instead of the other general hospital because of race.
The government is also introducing the National Health Insurance Scheme to address cases such as the one of a couple where the wife worked for government and had a medical aid. The husband was not working. When they were both involved in an accident, the wife was taken to the better hospital while the husband was driven for 20km to 50km to access a medical facility. So, we welcome all the efforts by the department to resolve our health care crisis in line with ANC policy, namely to provide all South Africans with access to quality health care.
The introduction and the fast-tracking of the developments in this sector ...