The board chairman of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) Dr. Ernest Kwarko has hinted the Authority will soon introduce an electronic payment system to curb illegal payments demand by some service providers from clients in various facilities.
He explained that NHIA is poised to tackle such practices in the health insurance sector in a bit to eradicate corruption which is a bottleneck to the successful implementation of the pro-poor intervention.
Dr. Kwarko was speaking at a media engagement in Accra ahead of the 2021 NHIS Week Celebration.
“Now the illegal payments; I have actually gone ahead to form an ad hoc committee to tackle it head-on. All the relevant stakeholders including Ghana Health Service (GHS) are all this committee”.
“We have to tackle it head-on because it doesn’t make any sense if a pregnant woman who needs the service and you are collecting monies that are financial asset barrier. So we are going to take it up”.
Meanwhile, Dr. Lydia Dsane-Selby, the CEO of the NHIA also said the Authority is strategising to get more people in the urban areas to register onto the scheme.
Dr Dsane-Selby said, “Traditionally, health insurance was marketed as a pro-poor strategy. So for a long time, Accra people thought we were never poor, even the poor feel they are not poor. In the beginning, when we were trying to register indigenes even in the rural areas”
“It has taken us a long time to get those who need help to accept the help… [There’s] so much work around trying to change the conception; so you find Takoradi is quite difficult to penetrate because it’s an oil city they feel they are not poor and we need to market it differently.”
She added, “if we bring prevention on board properly, we can market the scheme in a different way and maybe attract all these people into the scheme. But it’s a challenge”
Dr. Dsane-Selby said the NHIA is also considering the coverage of the treatment of childhood cancers and family planning services under the scheme.
This follows the successful piloting and actuarial studies conducted to determine the financial sustainability of the scheme.
She said analysis indicated that the scheme could accommodate the treatment of childhood cancers and provision of family planning services without much strain.
The decision is in line with the 2030 Universal Health Coverage (UHC) target of achieving 80% reduction of health care cost for patients, 80% coverage of the population on NHIS, and making health care accessible to 80% of the population.
