If by public health you are referring to the government's provision of health-care, then yes, you are right. It's absolutely abysmal and very unfortunate for those unable to afford a private medical aid here.
So in the grand-scheme of things, public-health in SA is a failure, with the majority of the public being very poor and unable to afford medical aid. However, the model of the private sector on it's own is something that we've seen works and can probably be scaled up if government stayed out of meddling and "tweaking" it to their social value system. So if all they did was give people money to spend on their preferred medical aid (similar to the proposed "school credits" in the USA), then I think it'd work and the poor would have great access to healthcare despite not being able to afford it on their own.
Unfortunately, the 11% of tax-expenditure being spent on healthcare is not enough to cover such a thing, and they'd have to scale that up. Other things to keep in mind is that they have a ridiculously tiny tax-base here due to the inequality (I.e. something like only 10% of people pay income tax). The other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the money that tax-payers here pay for, they don't actually use at all. E.g. Police, ambulance, fire services. They might as well be non-existant and defunded because the private sector has picked up the slack. As an example, just the other day I found out their largest city has less than 10 working fire trucks.
So in the grand-scheme of things, public-health in SA is a failure, with the majority of the public being very poor and unable to afford medical aid. However, the model of the private sector on it's own is something that we've seen works and can probably be scaled up if government stayed out of meddling and "tweaking" it to their social value system. So if all they did was give people money to spend on their preferred medical aid (similar to the proposed "school credits" in the USA), then I think it'd work and the poor would have great access to healthcare despite not being able to afford it on their own.
Unfortunately, the 11% of tax-expenditure being spent on healthcare is not enough to cover such a thing, and they'd have to scale that up. Other things to keep in mind is that they have a ridiculously tiny tax-base here due to the inequality (I.e. something like only 10% of people pay income tax). The other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the money that tax-payers here pay for, they don't actually use at all. E.g. Police, ambulance, fire services. They might as well be non-existant and defunded because the private sector has picked up the slack. As an example, just the other day I found out their largest city has less than 10 working fire trucks.