Health insurance capitation to hit three other regions
The National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) will by the end of June extend the second phase of the capitation programme to the Upper East, Upper West and the Volta regions after the pilot phase in Ashanti Region.
The exercise, which will be under Ministry of Health supervision, will take on another set of regions till the whole country is covered.
This was announced by Ms Sherry Ayittey during a “Meet the Press” series organised by the Ministry of Information in Accra. She explained that the introduction of capitation was not to punish any group of people but to clear the system of corruption. She added that “the pilot has proven successful in achieving that”.
She noted that healthcare utilisation of the NHIS rose from 16.6 million in 2009 to 27.4 million in 2013.
The Health Minister said NHIA in 2013 paid GH₵ 748 million in claims as compared to GH₵ 362 million in 2009 and explained that the growing utilisation of services under the scheme is overstretching the financial status of the policy.
She commended the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA), Medical and Dental Council and the Pharmacy Council for their hard work in improving service delivery to Ghanaians and called for all to make good use of the limited resources.
Ms Ayittey encouraged the FDA to do more training of regulatory staff and expose them to international best practices to enable them deal with effectively with the issue of counterfeit medicines.
