Kumasi, March 16, GNA - A leading member of the National Democratic Congress, Alhaji Sulemana Gado, has called on the Government to do more to bring efficiency and transparency into the operation of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). The present situation where patients are forced to buy drugs, including those catered for under the scheme's drug list, he said, was completely unacceptable and needed to change.

It should not be lost on anyone that the NHIS is one intervention that has brought significant relief to especially the poor, and this is why everything should be done to remove all identified bottlenecks and corrupt practices. Alhaji Gado made the call through the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Kumasi on Wednesday. He also suggested that the government should pick the medical bills of children suffering from serious health conditions that are often expensive to treat to save their parents the trouble of making appeals to the public for support.

He said this should not be too difficult for the government to do given the fact that Ghana had now joined the club of oil producing nations.

Alhaji Gado again raised concern about the reluctance of some hospitals to release corpses of Muslims for early burial in line with their Islamic faith.

The insistence that the bodies of dead Muslims should be kept in the mortuary until post-mortem examination is done tends to create unnecessary tension between facilities and the Muslim community. He said their Islamic values must be respected, he added.