National
Health Insurance Scheme as stated in their website was "established
under the National Health Insurance Scheme Act, Cap42, Laws of the
Federation of Nigeria, 2004, is aimed at providing easy access for all
Nigerians at an affordable cost through various prepayment systems. NHIS
is totally committed to securing universal coverage and access to
adequate and affordable healthcare in order to improve in order to
improve the health of Nigerians, especially for those participating in
the various programmes/products of the scheme".
What captured my
attention in the preamble are two points quoted as follows :(" is aimed
at providing easy access for all Nigerians at an affordable cost) and
"NHIS is totally committed to securing universal coverage and access to
adequate and affordable healthcare' 'Do you know that NHIS scheme has
the potential to provide health care services to all Nigerians and
definitely, a major driving tool for achieving universal health
coverage. However, the scheme since introduction 13 years ago covered
only 1.5% of the Nigerian population. From conception, the programme was
lopsided in favour of federal government staff. Later, some state
governments joined albeit dropped along the line. The biggest question
in my mind is why such a laudable project failed to achieve its desired
goals. To answer the above question, we need to know how the scheme
works and then try to trace the root cause of the problem. NHIS is a
regulatory body that supervises the operation of health insurance in
Nigeria. The key stakeholders are the Health Maintenance Organization
(HMO) and accredited NHIS hospitals. The end -users registered with any
NHIS-accredited hospital through their HMOs and pay only 10% of charges
for services provided. The HMOs claimed the users' bill from NHIS. The
flow chain thus entails government (NHIS)-HMOs-Hospital.
See FULLSTORY
Nigeria: National Health Insurance (NHIs) and Matters Arising - allAfrica.com