Accra, April 30, GNA - The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) rate of coverage has far exceeded targets planned for its short period of existence, Mr Ras Boateng, Chief Executive Officer, National Health Insurance Authority, said on Wednesday.

He said the scheme was estimated to attain 30-40 per cent registration within five years yet it had already registered a total of 11,279,678 out of which 9,773,100 (representing 48 per cent) were eligible for identification cards.

The scheme also had a medium-term plan to register between 50 per cent and 60 per cent of qualified people and finally cover every resident of Ghana in the long-term plan, he said. Taking his turn at the meet-the press series on Wednesday in Accra, Mr Boateng said a total of 8,291,666 identification cards (representing 42 per cent) were issued by the 145 schemes in operation.

Out of the number registered, informal adults formed 25 per cent, those under 18 years, 61 per cent, SSNIT contributors, 6.5 per cent, 70 years and above, four per cent, pensioners, one per cent and indigents, 2.5 per cent.

Mr. Boateng said the NHIS was one of few programmes in the world that did not require co-payment for service accessed by members. That, he said, became more marked when one considered that 95 per cent of disease conditions that commonly afflicted Ghanaians were covered by the NHIS benefit package.

He said the scheme had improved access to basic healthcare and reports of increases in OPD attendance of between 20 and 50 per cent in a cross-section of provider facilities was testimony to that.

"By accrediting about 1,135 private providers in addition to all public healthcare providers, the NHIS has widened choices available to members of the NHIS for seeking healthcare services. This has also contributed to improving access to healthcare," he added.

Touching on challenges facing the scheme, Mr. Boateng said the full roll-out of a health insurance scheme of the nature being implemented in Ghana had met with some challenges.

He mentioned limited scope of NHIS approved medicines, non-standardised scheme operations, potential fraud by member/scheme/provider, inadequate human capital, linkage of children's registration to that of their parents, difficulty in identifying accredited providers and communication gap between NHIA and stakeholders as some of the challenges.

"It is, however, fair to say that health insurance programmes worldwide have faced, or continue to face, challenges in their implementation. It is such challenges that have called for the continuous attempts to re-engineer the health insurance programmes of countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, the United States of America and many others," he said.

Mr. Boateng said having regard to challenges encountered in the implementation of the scheme, the NHIA would continue to undertake strategic initiatives to address them in full knowledge that addressing of challenges is not an event but a continuous process. He said, as part of the strategic initiatives, the Authority would resort to periodic review of tariff structure and medicines list and introduce logo for identification of NHIS-accredited providers.

The Chief Executive said with all those in place, they expected that ease of registration and issuance of ID cards would become permanent features of the programme, transform the NHIA into a solution-based organisation.

The NHIS became operational in 2005.