Guardian

DESPITE its dream of securing universal coverage and access to adequate and affordable healthcare in order to improve the health status of Nigerians, the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) is yet to enjoy good support from state governments, Acting Executive Secretary of NHIS, Dr. Abdulrahman Sambo, has said.

The scheme established under Act 35 of 1999 by the Federal Government of Nigeria, is aimed at providing easy access to healthcare for all Nigerians at an affordable cost through various prepayment systems, especially for those participating in the various programmes/products of the scheme.

Sambo told journalists that among the three tiers of government, it is only the Federal Government that is making contributions to the scheme. He said, however, that his office has since embarked on advocacy to states on the need to embrace the scheme, noting that some states had started showing signs of adopting it.

He said: “It is only the Federal Government that is paying its own contribution to NHIS and NHIS has been covering backlog of people. But, what have we been doing to ensure that all Nigerians are covered? We won’t just fold our hands and say ‘no, we have problem with our law; we can’t implement’. No! So, we have been going round all the states sensitising the governors, sensitising the political leaders, the traditional leaders and individuals to appreciate the value of health insurance and the need to adopt one form of NHIS programme or another.

“Realizing the complexity of Nigeria and absence of social security system, we now design programmes that will fit into the different socio-economic groups that we have identified because it is about financing health. We have to categorise the people into socio-economic groups. That is how we now designed community-based health insurance programme where individuals living in a defined area or having one form of association such as motorcycle riders association, drivers’ association, farmers and others. They can come together and make their contributions into a pool managed by them or in they may want NHIS to do it on their behalf. NHIS assists in the management of that scheme.”

He said many people were yet to understand the NHIS scheme in full, as such, the misgivings.