NHIs’ implementation should focus on poor people – NACA DG

Nigeria needs to go back to the drawing board on implementation of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), in order to be able to retool the populist insurance scheme to care for vulnerable poor.

The Director of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS, NACA, Mr. Sani Aliyu, who said this recently, expressed worry that the entire budget for health insurance in the UK ‘was bigger than that of Nigeria.’

He said the NHIS in Nigeria was not designed in ‘a ‘progressive way’; and that it should begin by ‘appropriating health care from the vulnerable perspective by making sure the poor get quality care.’

Aliyu said this in his keynote speech at the commencement of a two-day national health dialogue in Abuja, adding that it was wrong to begin the insurance scheme with the government workers.

The establishment of the NHIS came about by the desire of the federal government to better serve the health needs of the population. The scheme made it possible for the insured to seek immediate care whenever there is imminent need to see a physician.
However, the scheme, which was set up to ensure financing of health care costs and management for Nigerians through pooling and judicious use of financial resources to ensure cost burden sharing for patients through pre-payment mechanisms, has been enmeshed in several controversies.

Since its establishment 12 years ago, the number of Nigerians covered by the scheme is about 1.5 per cent of the population who are mostly civil servants and corporate workers in the private sector.

Insurance Stories by Bonny Amadi