Health care as an instrument of Apartheid policy in South Africa

Max Price

84 citations0/0 files storedHealth Policy and Planning

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Healthcare Systems and Reforms Healthcare Systems and Practices South African History and Culture

Abstract

The paper focuses on five central features of health policy in South Africa. These are: (1) the differential expenditure on the health services for Whites, Coloureds, Indians and Africans; (2) the inequality between rural and urban African health services; (3) the structure and financing of rural health services for Africans; (4) the recent restructuring of the urban health services for Whites, Coloureds and Indians under the New Constitution; and (5) family planning policy. In each case the policy cannot be adequately explained merely as a symptom of the differential access to political and economic power: health services are also instruments of the state in achieving Apartheid goals. Firstly, the health services aid in the reproduction of the Black labour force according to White economic needs. The provision of health care for Blacks outside the bantustans is geared towards the urban population as the supplier of a large and increasingly skilled, Black workforce, rather than the Black population at large. Secondly, the health services support the commitment to ‘separate development’ in various ways. They reproduce an ideology which legitimizes Apartheid. Within the bantustans, they are an important factor in inducing ‘surplus’ Africans from ‘White’ areas to return to the bantustans. They help to establish the credibility of the bantustans and their leaders, and of the representatives in the new segregated parliament. They also provide a lever with which the government can pressurize bantustan governments into accepting ‘independence’. Thirdly, the health services are part of a strategy to co-opt some Blacks while dividing the opposition. Thus health policy is shown to be an instrument of the state's twin imperatives: reproducing the conditions of capitalist accumulation and maintaining White supremacy.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 84 citations exist upstream.

Cited by

1993The competing discourses of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa: Discourses of rights and empowerment vs discourses of control and exclusion 2018Decentralization, healthcare access, and inequality in Mpumalanga, South Africa 1988The consequences of health service privatisation for equality and equity in health care in South Africa 2006Commercialisation and extreme inequality in health: the policy challenges in South Africa 2023A socio-political history of South Africa’s National Health Insurance 2021Catching up with the constitution: An analysis of National Health Insurance in South Africa post-apartheid 2011Health care inequity in South Africa and the public-private mix 2000The Recognition of Access to Health Care as a Human Right in South Africa: Is It Enough?

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.