McIntyre bows out with NHI talk

Professor Di McIntyre, a health economist known for her fierce championing of a well-funded and fair public health system, will deliver her valedictory lecture, titled “A Universal Health System for SA: Some final words on NHI” at UCT on 9 November 2017.

The National Health Insurance (NHI) plan is a financing system, mooted by Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, that is designed to ensure that all South Africans and legal long-term residents are provided with essential healthcare regardless of their employment status or ability to pay directly for medical service.

McIntyre will reflect on her decades-long work on ideas like the NHI and will explain her vision of what a universal health system should look like.

Professor John Ataguba from UCT’s Health Economics Unit (HEU) says that in her lecture “Professor McIntyre will debunk the myths about the NHI – what it is and what it is not.”

McIntyre, who founded the HEU in 1990, is well-placed to opine on the NHI. When the Department of Health created the seven NHI work streams, which had a mandate to review the NHI implementation, she was involved with three of them. She was also part of the ministerial task team that looked at the NHI.

McIntyre has consistently argued for an increase in spending on the public health sector. Her 2008 inaugural lecture critiqued the current health system and the challenges facing it, and in 2015 she was appointed as the executive director of the International Health Economics Association.

McIntyre is due to retire at the end of this year after working at UCT for more than 20 years.

She will deliver her valedictory lecture on 9 November 2017 at the Wolfson Pavilion Lecture Theatre in the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Health Sciences. The lecture begins at 14:00 and runs to 15:30.