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The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Health Insurance Authority, Dr Da-Costa Aboagye, has called for the amendment of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) Act to ensure the immediate release of National Health Insurance Levy (NHIL) proceeds to the scheme.
He indicated that the current bureaucratic process where proceeds from the NHIL had to go through the Consolidated Fund Accounts before their release was impacting negatively on the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) operations.
He said levies should be paid into the NHIL account, “to remove such delays as in the Controller has not released the money, Finance has not released the money; all those things will stop because at the end of the day it goes into the NHIL account and the money will be there to pay the claims needed by Ghanaians.”
Dr Aboagye was speaking at a media and stakeholder engagement organised in Takoradi last Friday. Participants were drawn from the Western, Central, Western North, Volta and Upper West regions.
On payment of funds from the NHIA to service providers, he said the authority did not owe the lower service provider facilities, explaining that it had paid providers up to March, which was the statutorily acceptable payment period.
He said the excuse that the authority owed the service providers for which reason services were not provided or drugs were unavailable had compelled the authority to connect to the electronic pharmacy (e-Pharmacy) platforms.
The e-pharmacy platform connectivity, he explained, would allow the providers to be connected to the e-Pharmacy platform and drugs sought in the clients’ locality where the drug is available or delivered to his home if a service provider did not have a particular drug readily available.
He stressed that efforts were being made to improve monitoring structures to ensure illegalities in payments in the system were reduced to the barest minimum.
Dr Aboagye said all Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) contributors had their contributions to the scheme waived to allow them to be automatic members of the NHIS.
Previoulsy, SSNIT contributors paid eight cedis to join the scheme. He said the NHIS covered 95 per cent of diseases, which to a large extent, would help the country towards achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs).
He said data indicated that diabetes and hypertension were the main cost drivers, which required actions to ensure prevention. To address these head-on, he said the NHIA was implementing preventive health care by allowing all Ghanaians to go to a health facility in their month of birth to check their blood sugar, blood pressure and body mass index.
That, Dr Aboagye said, would detect the disease early, increase their life expectancy, help achieve the universal health coverage, which would accelerate the achievement of the wellness component of the SDGs.
He said the move would hopefully change the architecture of the health system from the basically curative towards preventive care. He said the efforts to synchronise the Ghana Card with health insurance was accelerating the efforts towards universal health coverage, saying currently a special project had been rolled out to provide children between the ages of six and 15 years with the Ghana Card.
The Board Chairman of the NHIA, Dr Ernest Kwarko, for his part, expressed worry over dishonesty on the part of some service providers, saying that derailed efforts being made to improve the scheme.
He, however, gave an assurance that the NHIA would continue to work with all stakeholders to strengthen the scheme's efficiency and the overall health of Ghanaians.
