The capitation health insurance program which is being piloted in the Ashanti region will soon be expanded to other regions of the country , the National Health Insurance Authority has said.
The comment is in response to claims by the senior minister Yaw Osafo Marfo that government is on the verge of canceling the program in the Ashanti region because it has failed.
According to the Senior minister, the Mahama administration, which initiated the progam, would have expanded it, if it were successful.
“We have met and discussed… If you implement something and its good, you take it elsewhere, the capitation grant that was brought to the Ashanti Region didn’t yield any results. If you implement something and it doesn’t work, you don’t take it elsewhere; you will hear from government on it. We will cancel it. Very soon you hear from government on the way forward,” he said.
Commenting on the issue on Morning Starr Monday, the deputy public affairs director of the NHIA, Oswald Essumah Mensah, said the necessary consultations and preparations have been made to begin the expansion of the program across the country.
“There were challenges that engulfed the implementation of the program at the time it was being implemented. Since then, we have tried to learn the lessons as to why the program wasn’t that successful in the Ashanti region. About two years ago, we had some funding from the USAID who assisted the NHIA to scale up capitation for the rest of the country. So there was a lot of lessons learnt from the experience in the Ashanti region which informed the fact that we had to do more extensive stakeholder engagement and public sensitization in a phased approach to be able to enroll it across the country.
“So we were able to have a stakeholder engagement in the Upper East, Upper West and Volta regions. As we speak, those regions are ready to implement capitation on a full scale, and we also in talks with the USAID who have expressed the willingness again to fund the stakeholder engagement and proper education and sensitization across the six other regions. As far as I am aware, we are on course to roll it across the country,” he told host of Morning Starr Francis Abban.
He however added: “There are some challenges however in the Ashanti region for which reason the new Chief Executive Dr. Anoh met with practitioners or providers in the Ashanti region a couple of months ago to listen to their concerns and to learn, at first-hand, what the issues have been in the region and why it hasn’t gone across the country”.
