About Us

The Health Policy Unit (HPU) is a division of the Free Market Foundation (Southern Africa), an independent non-profit policy organisation (No 020-056-NPO) which promotes and fosters an open society, the rule of law, personal liberty, and economic and press freedom as fundamental components of its advocacy of human rights and democracy based on classical liberal principles.

The HPU believes that high quality health care is best achieved in a world of freedom and responsibility, free of centrally initiated force, where the individual’s self-interest is channelled into positive economic exchanges for mutual benefit by the rule of law, sound and properly functioning legal systems, secure property rights (including intellectual property rights), the enforcement of contracts, and an absence of barriers to entry into economic activity. In such an environment, production is guided by the demands of consumers and co-ordinated by freely formed prices that inform producers regarding changes in those demands. In this system the indigent are largely dependent for assistance on philanthropy or voluntary collective action, including state assistance to the indigent.

In the interim, the HPU urges government to devote its limited health budget to the supply of services to the poor, to purchase an increasing percentage of those services from private providers, and to allow and encourage the rapid growth of the private health care sector, enabling it to provide services to an increasing percentage of the population.

In carrying out its advocacy work the Health Policy Unit’s central theme is that patients will be best served by a rapidly growing private healthcare sector, serving a steadily increasing percentage of the population, to the point where the government will no longer need to provide healthcare to the poor but purchase their healthcare needs from a competitive private sector. The advocacy therefore includes proposals for the transformation, wherever possible, of public sector healthcare providers (hospitals, clinics, research laboratories etc) into privately owned entities, mainly by means of a massive BBBEE transfer to the people working in those entities, and to the people living in surrounding communities, together with negotiated contracts for the entities to provide government-funded services to their existing patients and clients.

Management Team

	Eustace Davie (Director)  Eustace is a Chartered Accountant who joined the Free Market Foundation in 1981. He was chairman of the FMF's Health Focus Team for several years, and has provided written and oral evidence to government on various policy documents and health-care bills, commencing in 1993 with evidence before the Melamet Commission, and more recently on the medicines pricing regulations and the Health Charter.
	Jasson Urbach (Director)  Jasson completed a Bachelors of Commerce with majors in Finance and Economics, honours in Economics and Masters in Economics at the University of Natal in Durban. His Masters’ thesis was on The Determinants of Labour Force Participation of The Elderly. He works as an economist at the Free Market Foundation and for Africa Fighting Malaria and has published academic papers. He has also had a number of opinion pieces republished in the popular media.
	Johan Biermann (Consultant)  Johan Biermann is a planning consultant and policy researcher in Pretoria, South Africa. His research includes the impact of government planning and regulation on economic development and service delivery, including the effect of legislation, regulation and government policy on the delivery of health-care. His published articles on health care include Government can reduce medicine prices overnight (2003), Certificates of need are a recipe for chaos (2004), Health charter perpetuates fallacies (2005), and Ending poverty (2005). He is the author of Undermining Mineral Rights: an International Comparison (2001) and Town Planning and the Market (2002), both published by the Free Market Foundation, of which he is a Council member. Conference papers include A Critique of Social Health Insurance (2004).
	Leon Louw (Advisor)  Executive Director of the Free Market Foundation since 1978 and has had a significant impact on policy-making in South Africa since joining the Foundation. He is a well-known commentator on current affairs and co-author of SA: The Solution and Let the People Govern. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring about a peaceful transition to democratic government. His articles on diverse economic issues have been published in major SA newspapers. His most recent publication is Habits of Highly Effective Countries (2006).
	Temba Nolutshungu (Advisor)  Became a Director of the Free Market Foundation in 1990. He played a prominent role in the Black Consciousness Movement in his youth. In 1998 he accompanied members of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health on a fact-finding trip to the UK and the Czech Repuplic to study health care provision in those countries. He has provided written and oral evidence to government on health care issues, most recently on the pricing of medicines and on the Health Charter.
	Terry Markman (Advisor)  Council Member of the Free Market Foundation since 1980 and currently Deputy Chairman of the Executive Committee. He is a consulting engineer with a BSc in Civil Engineering and a MSc in Highway & Transportation.