The acting Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme, Femi Akingbade, has said that heavy administrative charges and bureaucracy among identity managers have slowed the spread of the National Mobile Health Insurance Programme, which was inaugurated in 2014.
The acting ES said the NHIS had not been providing the mobile health insurance payments optimally, while the accruable fees from agreed distribution of funds were being sucked by administrative charges on mobile network operators.
Akingbade said, “We record delivery failure because the stakeholders seem not to totally agree with the payments and fees that accrue to them, based on the agreed distribution of the funds being contributed.
“We discovered that because of the mobile network operators that are involved, there are sundry official charges they need to pay and much of the fees go into administrative charges – one of the things we are trying to check.”
As constituted, the MHI requires the NHIS to tap into the teledensity of nearly 120 million Nigerians registered on mobile networks, and to also link enrolees’ phone numbers to existing data already captured by operators during the SIM card registration.
However, the data is warehoused by the Nigerian Communications Commission, but if the NHIS has access to it, it will prevent new efforts at capturing fresh biometrics for any new enrolee of the mobile health insurance.
“This is what slowed down the process, but we are working at it. We are currently negotiating with the NCC to release the database for us so as to save time and cost.
“If somebody that owns a phone line wants to register for NMHIP, we need the data so that we don’t start to capture new biometric data,” he explained.
He said the NHIS was working with the NIMC to harmonise the databases and to also use the opportunity to help NIMC to register people.
For the entire process to succeed, Akingbade noted, there was the need to collaborate with the NCC, the National Identity Management Corporation, Mobile Network Operators, and other agencies that manage identity in the country.
Meanwhile, the NHIS has promised to directly reimburse those already registered for the MHI when they visit hospitals.
Akingbade said no less than 20 hospitals in Lagos State had been chosen to pilot the reimbursement of MHI enrolees whose health coverage was enmeshed in the disagreement between network operators and identity managers.
BY: YETUNDE ADEYI
THE PUNCH
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