Sylvester Mensah, a former Chief Executive Officer of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), has criticised the authority’s GHS250,000 donation to the COVID-19 National Trust Fund.
According to him, the decision was not well thought through.
“Indeed, this decision is not a product of a sufficient thinking process; it is not well thought through. It further undermines the precarious situation the scheme is experiencing and only serves to deepen the mistrust and frustration among health care providers,” Mr. Mensah said in a post on Facebook.
A former Health Minister, Alex Segbefia, also had a similar assessment and said it was a “bad judgement call.”
The NHIA’s gesture was met with criticism because the authority has consistently struggled to settle the claims of its service providers.
Some service providers say the NHIA is yet to pay them their claims which in some cases date back to February 2019.
Despite the criticism, the Authority justified the donation saying it was in line with its legal mandate to “facilitate the provision of or access to health care services and to invest in any other facilitating programme to promote access to health service.”
It has also said the money was not from its coffers.
Find below Sylvester Mensah’s full post
I was momentarily dazed when I saw the NHIS make a huge donation of Ghc250k to the Covid19 fund during the Minister’s briefing session on national television.
At a time when the scheme has an average payment arrears of 9 months to healthcare providers across the country?
Granted that this gesture was truly a life-line for the containment strategy, perhaps it could have been done on the quiet but even that, no!
Is it for personal political reach or it serves the interest of the critical stakeholders of the scheme?
What signal does it provide even to government – that the scheme has excess funds to spare?
Indeed, this decision is not a product of a sufficient thinking process; it is not well thought through; it further undermines the precarious situation the scheme is experiencing and only serves to deepen the mistrust and frustration among health care providers.
Bad decision, bad move!