NHIS caters for maternity bills - Acquah

04/29/08
Story: Salome Donkor
The Media Relations Officer of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Mr Kwasi Acquah, has stated that with the operation of the NHIS the situation where some women are detained by officials of health institutions for the non-payment of maternity bills, should be a thing of the past.
He said this is because the scheme caters for pre and post-natal care, and cost of delivery, in addition to diseases such as Malaria, Diarrhoea, Upper Respiratory Tract Infection, Skin Diseases, Hypertension, Diabetes, Asthma, Breast and Cervical Cancer.
Reacting to reported cases of expectant mothers detained in hospitals after they have been delivered of their babies following their inability to pay their maternity bills, Mr Acquah said it was unreasonable for any women to have such a problem.
He described the NHIS as the only socially accepted programme and the only viable alternative to the cash and carry system, which provides solution to the problems of the country’s health care sector, adding that the scheme was universal, which means that the it was accessible to both the rich and the poor, old and young, as well as men and women.
He said the scheme, which is designed to offer affordable medical care, especially to the poor and vulnerable, covered about 95 per cent of diseases.
He, however, mentioned that currently, certain care like the giving of Optical aids, Hearing aids, Orthopaedic aids, Dentures, Beautification Surgery and AIDS drugs and the treatment of Chronic Renal Failure, and Heart and Brain Surgery were excluded from the benefit package, mainly because it might be too expensive to treat those diseases and therefore other arrangements were being considered to enable people to get these diseases treated.
Mr Acquah said it was unfortunate that some people still felt reluctant to register with the scheme, while others waited till they were sick and decide to do fast-track registration, which attracts extra fees.
He said although the Health Insurance Law enjoined everybody to make contributions into a National Health Insurance Fund through the payment of 2.5 per cent Health Insurance Levy on selected goods and services to enable contributors to access affordable health care in the country’s health facilities, only those who had registered benefited from the scheme, stressing that “those who have not registered with the scheme are cheating themselves”.
He said the practice whereby some people went to the aid of nursing mothers who were “detained” in hospitals for the non-payment of their medical bills should be discouraged to encourage all to register with the scheme.
According him, the NHIS has taken its corporate image and that by the end of this month, it would unveil the Governance Charter, to govern the activities of the NHIS, and the Audit Charter to make the system more exposed so that everybody would have confidence in it.
He further indicated that by May this year a pilot project to introduce uniformity in the system to enable NHIS card bearers to access the scheme in any part of the country, would kick off.