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"content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, this is what I call age discrimination. It is age discrimination in the sense that somebody lives to over 60 years; during those 60 years, he contributed productively to the life of the society. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we must realize that our African societies which had in-built mechanisms for taking care of old age have rapidly changed in the last 60 years. Societies are highly urbanized. Children stay in urban centres, in paid employment while their parents stay in rural areas, seeking lives as peasant farmers, or as retired civil servants. In those rural areas, there are not always facilities to provide proper health care for everybody. An elderly person depends on the younger persons who are their offspring to remit money to the rural areas to take care of them. That is the only insurance they have. In many cases, this insurance is not enough because the cost of health care, particularly private health care, is very high. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, at the moment, we are working on a social health scheme. Just this morning, I met our team working on health financing, preparing a position paper to be presented to a meeting in the Prime Ministerâs office under the auspices of the National Social and Economic Council, to look at the issue of health financing. A component of that health financing is social health insurance. What we are proposing as social health insurance is to insure people; either from their paid employment or purely as individuals, so that they can have access to health care. I am very happy to see that one of the principle objectives of this document is to promote individual responsibility to lifelong healthy life. Promote responsible and positive living, particularly among the youth and in childhood, expand and enhance community based health services and empower communities to take care of the of their older personsâ health needs, increase accessibility to appropriate health services and facilities, encourage and support research in relation to health and ageing and, among other things in terms of strategy, legally constitute and guarantee older persons rights to appropriate health care. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I hope that private insurance companies take that strategy seriously. That it is the responsibility of the Government to lay down the regulatory framework that will require that anybody offering insurance should not discriminate against old age. That phrase legally constitutes and guarantees older persons the right to appropriate health care. This must be underlined. If an older person chooses to take up health care insurance from a private insurance provide, he should have a right to buy that insurance. There should no funny little process in that insurance document discriminating against the older person. Secondly, as we go towards the older age, and that is why my friend, Mr. Mungatana is luckier than I am, he still young. He may not been feeling these things much more personally than I am. Old age infirmities begin to set in. You do not know how effectively your heart is going to beat until you are 80. It may slow down. You do not know how well your kidneys will be performing, they may equally slow down. So, certain ailments which are associated with old age begin to set in. When they set in, and insurance companies begin discriminating against covering those diseases, this is called age discrimination. We, as a Government, must put down a legal framework that stops anybody from refusing or failing to cover old age ailments because, as it were, they are expensive. It is again our responsibility as a Government to ensure that treating of these ailments is not expensive."
}