South African health financing reform 2000–2010: Understanding the agenda-setting process

Governments around the world are struggling to address persistent disparities in health care access. However, this priority competes with many others for support in moving onto and up the political agenda. In this paper, a novel method of agenda-setting analysis is developed by merging and modifying the Hall and Kingdon models. As a case study, this method is used to explore how health financing reform reached the policy agenda in South Africa between the years 2000 and 2010. Certain factors are identified that could have determined the agenda-setting process: a change in government, increase in the cost of private medical schemes, and increase in support for reform from various stakeholders. Further analysis, using a conceptual framework of interacting trends and shocks, identifies the growing middle class, the private sector, and workers unions as powerful actors and outlines further factors that may have contributed to the process: a broad political shift in the second half of the decade and the changing prioritisation of HIV/AIDS. Study findings have relevance to academics and policy makers in South Africa and beyond.