The northern regional manager of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Alhaji Hudu Iddrisu, has cautioned health service providers to desist from any illegality or face the wrath of the Clinical Audit.
According to Alhaji Iddrisu, there are reports of some providers demanding money from NHIS card bearers in consulting rooms and theaters before attending to them. Also medicines found on the NHIA’s medicines list are being sold to gullible NHIS members, while some prescribers deliberately prescribe outside the NHIA’s medicines list to cause card bearers to still buy these medications even though alternatives are on the list that should have been given to them free of charge.
Providers who indulge in this, he noted, at the end of the month, submit claims to the Authority for payments, including medicines and the services for which they have already collected monies from members.
Alhaji Iddrisu gave the warning on the occasion of the 2017 end-of- year performance review meeting in Tamale. The meeting was to review their performance for 2017 and chart a new way that might help end 2018 successfully. The meeting was attended by NHIS district Managers and officers from various districts in the northern region, including the Nanumba south, and East Gonja districts.
The NHIS, according to Alhaji Iddrisu, seeks to grant all residents in Ghana financial access to health care. This is because under the NHIS, the rich subsidies the poor, the healthy subsidies the sick, and the economically active pay for children and indigents. Therefore under no circumstance should financial constraints be a barrier to access basic health care by any resident of Ghana, he cautioned.
Alhaji Hudu explained that at the beginning of the year under review, the region was given a membership target of 1, 181,423. Along the line, due to unforeseen challenges regarding the supply of consumables and other related issues, he said the target was reviewed downward to 980,581.
At the end of December 2017 actual performance as a region was 879, 609 representing 89.7 percent of the annual target. He therefore challenged district officials to be transparent in their line of duty.
A senior monitoring and evaluation manager at the northern regional NHIS office, Mr. Mohammed Abdul-Salim, encouraged customers to report any misappropriation by providers.
BY: LILIAN D. WALTER
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