Members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) lack a clear understanding of the current dynamics of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), hence their comments that the scheme has collapsed, Sylvester Mensah, a former Chief Executive Officer of the NHIS, has said.

His remarks follow assertions by the presidential candidate of the NPP, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and other leading members of the party that the scheme, which was conceived by former President John Kufuor in 2003, has collapsed under the watch of the John Mahama-led government.

However, speaking at the final rally of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) at the Accra Sports Stadium on Monday December 5, Mr Mensah said: “The NHIS they left in 2009 is completely different from what we see today and it appears most of them don’t even have the capacity to understand the dynamics and the nature and how the scheme has grown from where we got it in 2009 to date.

“In 2009, the level of inefficiency and the level of abuse in the system was so high. It was so high that 20 per cent of every amount of money allocated to the health insurance scheme was designated as funds for administrative expenses to the extent that the district scheme had more resources even than our district assemblies.

“Not only that, by our legal regime we inherited Act 650 (Act 2003). The scheme could not be audited by any central body so you have scheme running with so much government resources and there was no way you could audit the scheme because the legal regime of the scheme does not allow such audit.”

He added: “Beyond that we had over 150 schemes and every scheme had a board. The board membership was 21. We had a board whose membership was larger than the staff of the scheme at the district level. If this is not inefficiency, then I don’t know what this is about.

“And these are the people who today are talking about health insurance and think that the people of this country will hand over the reins of this country to them to continue mismanaging this scheme.”


Source: Ghana/ClassFMonline.com