The Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Dr. Kwabena Duffour has in his presentation of the 2012 Budget praised highly the National Health Insurance Scheme for its performance over the course of the last few years and also dropped hints of new initiatives to further improve the Scheme�s operations in the coming years.
While touching on the performance of the Health sector in 2011, during the presentation of the 2012 Budget to Parliament last Thursday, November 17, 2011, the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning revealed that �to ensure the sustainability of the NHIS and adequate coverage, the Ministry of Health collaborated with the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare (MESW) and identified the very poor in society for registration under the National Health Insurance Scheme�, through the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme.
The identification and exemption of the poor in society from premium payment, according to experts, has relieved the poor of the burden of finding money to pay premiums, resulting in extending coverage to many of the poor and vulnerable in society, which is a unique means of ensuring that quality healthcare does not become a preserve of only the rich. These measures have also been instituted to meet various national and internationally accepted objectives like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of expanding healthcare coverage of the population.
Again, the 2012 budget indicated that major achievements were made in the area of claims management citing the auditing of 28,925,293 claims and the recovery of GH�471,215 from services and GH�755,582 from medicines in the course of the year. Greater progress was also made in clinical audit undertaken throughout the country where quality of care issues was addressed to ensure that subscribers get the quality care they require.
It would be recalled that some of the main issues which negatively affected the smooth administration of the National Health Insurance Scheme, in the past, included losses incurred from claims settlements as a result of fraud, inflation of prices of medicines supplied to subscribers, the irrational prescription of medicines, the overbilling of medicines, the provision of services above the accredited levels among many other such challenges which caused the scheme to lose huge sums of funds.
The recovery of various sums of money as indicated in the budget is therefore a step in the right direction and an indication of the prudent management initiatives instituted by the Sylvester Mensah led administration.
Mr. Mensah, earlier during the course of the year at various international conferences for health insurance managers and experts, indicated that clinical audit conducted into the scheme and various service provider facilities revealed some of the above listed constraints, which were being dealt with and the latest revelation from the Budget is an indication of the fulfillment of that promise.
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