By Wisdom Onimisi from Oshogbo
Nigeria with a population of 160 million is the most populous country in Africa. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s health sector, a foremost social services sector, has never really fared well until the establishment of National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). In May 1999, government created the scheme, with formal enablement of private sector participation to reflect Nigeria’s operation of a mixed economy and to correct the previous poor integration of private health facilities.
Although the law was signed in 1999, NHIS did not in fact become fully operational until 2005. The scheme operates under the Federal Ministry of Health and operates three main programmes, one formal, informal and vulnerable group social health insurance programme: The formal sector social health insurance (FSSHIP) covers public employees and the organized sectors, while the informal community based social health insurance program (CBSHIP) covers the informal sector.
The agency vision and mission; to improve the health statues of the largely informal Nigeria populace, through their individual and collective participation to ensure access to adequate, qualitative, affordance and equitable healthcare services and also to facilitate fare-financing of healthcare cost through pooling and judicious utilization of financial resources to provide and cost-burden sharing for people, against high cost of healthcare, through various prepayment(s) programs/product prior to their falling.
This made the Osun state office of the agency to organize a one day sensitization program tagged, Concept and operational modalities for National Health Insurance Scheme, for members of Federation of Informal Workers Organizations of Nigeria (FIWON) Ila-Orangun, Osun State chapter recently.
Delivering the lecture in local language, head of Informal Sector Department of the agency in Osun state office, Mr Falode Olalekan, provided detailed information on the agency’s Community Based Social Health Insurance Program (CBSHIP) package to the participants and it operational modalities.
Falode said many women, children and in particular the poorest of the poor die from avoidable health problems such as preventable infections, diseases, malnutrition, as well as complications from pregnancy and child birth, all owing to lack of basic understanding about numerous advantages of CBSHIP.
In his overview of the agency, the state coordinator of NHIS in Osun state Alhaji Ahmeed Yahaya, explained that the scheme is designed to be about resources pooling and risk sharing in order to drastically reduce the pressure on the government for funding of health sector.
He make clear that the program is a voluntary contribution by individual, families or community group to support the cost of healthcare services, with particular emphasis on primary healthcare, that is of mutual aid and social solidarity and typically for people in the informal and rural sector who are unable to get adequate public private or employee sponsored health insurance.
Falode also said that the agency’s mandate is to achieve universal coverage of all Nigerians and legal residents by the year 2015 with three dimensions namely; services coverage, cost coverage and population coverage. The National Health Insurance Scheme has the responsibility of setting the standards for the operation of the programme and ensures that enrolees’ rights are preserved.
