By Ajuma Edwina Ogiri
Abuja
National Insurance Health Scheme (NHIS) has said that it would conduct new biometric audit of enrollees in the scheme, to remove ghost enrollees and clog wastages.
Executive secretary of the scheme, Prof. Usman Yusuf, who disclosed this at a media chat with journalist in Abuja, said the “only way to clog wastage in the scheme is to know the true number of enrollees the scheme has.”
According to him, “there is so much inefficiency, corruption and political patronage in the scheme,” and “there is need to clean the house of this corruption, political patronage and inefficiency.”
He said: “If you are a federal government worker, and you have a wife and four children, the money comes out straight from the source to cover your family.
“But if you have more than one wife or more than four children, you will pay N9, 000 extra per person to add more.
“At least we know you, but we do not know the rest of the people. So, I am going to do biometric audit of all our enrollees. What that will do is to clog wastages.
“If they are ghost enrollees that are not there, but are put in there for us to pay Healthcare Management Organisations (HMOs) or doctors, I will find out.”
He further said: “Nigeria has one of the worst figures in health coverage all over the world with only four per cent, despite our huge human and capital resources.
“We can do better. We have the resources both human and capital to deploy, we have to cover more people. There is so much inefficiency, so much corruption and political patronage. People are just sitting there without any vision.
“Countries like Kenya, Ghana, and Rwanda, have achieved over 50 per cent coverage of its citizens. We have more resources; human and capital, than any of them, but it is how we used the resources that have bedevilled us.”
