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In what was widely acknowledged by participants as innovative and a global case study for social health insurance, the Chief Executive of Ghana�s National Health Insurance Scheme, Mr. Sylvester A. Mensah, has described funding arrangements and bi-partisan political will for Ghana�s social health financing mechanism as two key strengths of the scheme. The NHIS is principally funded from 2. 5% levy on goods and services and a transfer of 2. 5 percentage points of social security contributions. Speaking as a principal invited guest on the subject �Adaptable Lessons from Ghana�s NHIS: a Global Case Study�, at the Global Health 2011 Conference in London, United Kingdom, Mr. Sylvester Mensah highlighted the unique and exemplary features of the Ghana scheme that makes it worth emulating, and brought the world�s attention to the goodwill that the scheme enjoys from across the political divide. The conference, which brought together health policy makers and business leaders across the globe, was jointly organized by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and National Institute for Health & Clinical Excellence (NICE), and was under the theme �Policy for Sustainable and Effective Healthcare�. Touching on innovative ways of covering the poor and vulnerable, Mr. Mensah noted that under the National Health Insurance Scheme in Ghana, persons under 18 years, over 70 years, social security contributors and pensioners, pregnant women, indigents and state-endorsed socially-identified vulnerable groups such as Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) beneficiaries, are all exempt from paying premiums. The scheme allows for graduated premium for members from the informal sector, allowing for socio-economic separation of the rich and poor, particularly in the informal sector, for better targeting and optimum financial risk protection. Relating Ghana�s NHIS operations to the Millennium Development Goals, he mentioned that to facilitate the achievement of the 1st Millennium Development Goal, the NHIS has, as a key feature, free registration and access to healthcare for the poor and vulnerable. He indicated that by exempting the poor and vulnerable from premium payment, the NHIS was preventing those groups from catastrophic health expenditure that could push them further below the poverty line, thus addressing MDG 1. Furthermore, he indicated that children under 18 years old, who represent 47% of membership, are also exempt from premium payment, contributing to the reduction in child mortality under MDG 4, while the free maternal program contributed to improving maternal health, MDG 5. He also stressed that the scheme currently covers about 95% of disease conditions in Ghana including malaria and other HIV/AIDS opportunistic illnesses aimed at MDG 6. �The NHIS Medicines List was derived from the Essential Medicines List of the Ministry of Health�, he added. The NHIS boss said leadership and management are currently looking beyond �now� to address emerging sustainability challenges confronting the scheme. As part of measures, a Clinical Audit process was put in place in 2010 to review claims payment, assure quality of care, and check supply side moral hazards that had bedeviled the scheme. These include wrong application of tariffs, irrational prescription of medicines, inflation of the quantities of medicines supplied, unauthorized co-payment, the provision of services above accreditation level and overbilling of medicines by some providers. Mr. Sylvester Mensah hinted that an NHIS Call Centre will soon be established to readily respond to queries and complaints from stakeholders, particularly subscribers, while a mechanism to link treatment directly to diagnosis, e-claims processing, the establishment of a Health Insurance Institute and the formation of a Stakeholders� Advisory Committee (SAC) of the Scheme are all in the works. These initiatives, he said, are meant to address some of the challenges of the scheme which include late submission of claims, challenges associated with renewal, and poor quality of services provided to member by some schemes and service providers. Other challenges include, means-testing to better identify the poor in the informal sector, constraints in ID card management, how to improve the selection of medicines to ensure value for money, reducing waste in the pharmaceutical supply chain and pricing of health technologies such as equipment, medicines, vaccines and laboratory regents, among other things. In conclusion, Mr. Mensah introduced participants to the Health Insurance Value Chain, a framework for securing financial risk protection of the Scheme, drawing from his experience as a finance and strategic management professional, adding that broad involvement of stakeholders in the development of NHIS systems was a critical success factor. Mr. Sylvester A. Mensah was appointed Chief Executive of Ghana�s National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) in June 2009 and has since introduced various reforms and features to streamline the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). Under his leadership, Ghana�s scheme won the United Nations (WHO-UNDP) South-South Co-operation Excellence Award in 2010 in recognition of improving financial access to healthcare services. Other speakers at the conference included Mr. David Brennan, CEO, AstraZeneca, the Ministers of Health from Turkey, Vietnam and Sir Andrew Dillon, Chief Executive of NICE, UK, among others. The conference is a two-way learning experience between health policy makers and business leaders.