Accra, May 14, GNA - The National Health Insurance Council (NHIC) on Monday said it was coming out with a uniform ID card for all schemes as a permanent solution to the problem of Identity Cards (ID) and portability.

Mr Ras Boateng, Executive Secretary of the Council who announced at a workshop on the NHIS for media personnel said the uniform ID cards system would be operational before the end of the year. The workshop, which attracted over 50 health journalists from almost all the media houses, was aimed at adequately informing the participants on the law and the legislative instrument establishing the council and the extent of national coverage of the scheme so far. Mr Boateng said in the interim, the Council was tackling the problem of backlog in the issuance of the ID cards and directed all the 142 District Mutual Health Insurance Schemes to issue ID cards to all new members immediately after they had registered and paid their premiums.

He said the council did not approve of the practice by scheme managers in the past where ID cards were not issued for people who were going through registration until after the waiting period of between three to six months.

"What the Council is saying is that the cards should be given to the owners. It is the responsibility of the owners to wait till they are eligible to access free health care with the cards before they do so." "The law says it is the duty of the Service Providers to authenticate NHIS ID cards. The schemes will not pay for any member who has not gone through the waiting period," he said.

He said currently the scheme had registered nearly eight million people, which was about 40 percent of the national population and issued about four thousand ID cards which also accounted for over 19 percent of the national population.

He said the registered exempt population also stood at nearly four million reflecting 48.7 percent of all the registered population. On the regional coverage, the Greater Accra Region was found to be lagging behind in terms of the total registered number of persons, which stood at 688,737 with the Ashanti region being the highest with a total of 1.7 million registered.

Mr Boateng explained that the low coverage in the Greater Accra region was the result of a chunk of residents whose employers were paying for their health care needs as benefits under their various Collective Bargaining Agreements and therefore saw no need to register with the NHIS.

He said the implementation of the NHIS had come with tough challenges, which the council, schemes and service providers were working hard, to surmount. He cited some of them as lack of infrastructure to do proper vetting of claims and monitor fraud and difficulty in identifying indigents for free coverage.

Mr. Boateng said as the way forward, the Commission intended to intensify continued education and training of personnel, develop comprehensive human resource policies to retain competent staff and improve its financial sustainability through investments. He called on the media to partner with the NHIC to provide accurate information and educate the public on the benefits of the scheme to ensure that total coverage was achieved for the nation. 14 May 07.