40 million Nigerians to receive insurance cover next year – NHIS

The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) is working towards enrolling a minimum of 40 million Nigerians in the scheme next year. Executive secretary of the agency, Mr Olufemi Akingbade made this known yesterday during an interactive session with newsmen in Abuja. He said this will include maternal and child health, students enrolled in public primary […]

The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) is working towards enrolling a minimum of 40 million Nigerians in the scheme next year.
Executive secretary of the agency, Mr Olufemi Akingbade made this known yesterday during an interactive session with newsmen in Abuja.
He said this will include maternal and child health, students enrolled in public primary schools across the country, cases of emergency, and  internally displaced persons.
He called on states to make it mandatory for indigenes and residents to be under one insurance scheme or the other,  adding that the agency will partner with any state that is willing to adopt the blueprint of the State Social Insurance Scheme.
He said the agency will soon come up with a scheme called unified maternal and child health that will take care of a continuum for women, and it is also partnering with the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) on insurance for people living with HIV/AIDS.
Akingbade who started manning the agency since April this year said within the last eight months, the state offices of the agency have become more functional, they have reconstituted the  tertiary health insurance scheme, expanding the  voluntary health insurance scheme and appointed managers .
The NHIS boss said they are working on revising the  Mobile Health Insurance Scheme  because of some perceived gaps, and it will be repackaged for better services saying “We are still running it, it is not stopped, it will kick off in the first quatre of 2016.”
While stating that the agency is trying to address gaps in the scheme, the executive secretary said they  are working towards putting it on the concurrent list, and has  identified some people to make  direct interventions for the poor, vulnerable, and socially excluded, among others.
While soliciting the assistance of the media, he said quality assurance is very important for them and they have melted punitive measures to defaulting Health Management Organizations.