The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), Dr. Da-Costa Aboagye has called on Ghanaians to support the government’s determination to make quality healthcare service accessible to all Ghanaians.
According to him, no health facility or practitioner is willing to know the political affiliation before providing any healthcare, an indication that sickness has no political shirt, colour and affiliation.
To this, he passionately appealed to Ghanaians to support management of the NHIA and come together to ensure that the vulnerable and needy who are sick get quality healthcare services devoid of politics.
Citing the recent free dialysis service, he mentioned that, the introduction of the intervention was not for political gains, but to support the vulnerable and needy in society, adding that parliament approved the GHC2 million request not based on political condition.
“When we went to parliament, it never considered this on political bases. They said that the people of Ghana need the dialysis support, so how much can you allocate to the dialysis patient and we got an initial GHC2million,” he stated.
He continued that “in any case when you go to the hospital does the dialysis patient ask whether I am an NDC or NPP. You don’t say that and it is important we all come together to support the needy and vulnerable who are sick, devoid of politics”.
Dr. Aboagye made the call during a stakeholder meeting in Koforidua last week Saturday.
The meeting among other matters was to unveil his vision for driving the NHIS towards achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC)with a strong emphasis on promotive and preventive medicine packages.
Dr. Aboagye aims to revolutionise health-seeking behaviour of Ghanaians through four thematic areas including preventive healthcare, digitalisation agenda, insurance of non-Ghanaians or visitors and elimination of illegal payment.
On preventive healthcare, the NHIA CEO opined that the benefits of preventive healthcare are cost-effective as against the curative healthcare.
He explained that, the preventive healthcare would increase the life expectancy of Ghanaians as well as reducing the huge financial injections into the curative healthcare, a position, he said when well understood, would help the country.
Dr. Aboagye stated that, the digitalization agenda of the government had contributed appreciably towards the attainment of the Universal Health Coverage since his outfit and the National Identification Authority are working on using the Ghana in place of the NHIS card.
He was of the view that, once that is done, the Ghana card number would automatically become the NHIS number and would facilitate the achievement of the Universal Health Coverage and reduce cost of printing NHIS cards.
The NHIA boss further mentioned that the issue of illegal payment is gradually becoming a thing of the past following the introduction of the Ghana card.
