Employers of labour in the private sector have been advised to harness either the state health insurance programme or the Group, Individual and Family Social Health Insurance Programme (GIFSHIP) of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).
Lekan Ewenla, a member of the governing council of the Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA), and immediate past chairman of Health and Managed Care Association of Nigeria (HMCAN), stated this while briefing newsmen in Abuja.
Ewenla who is also the managing director of Ultimate Health HMO said private organisations could adopt the measures while still utilising their existing Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) to drive the programme.
He said , “The truth is that provision of evidence-based qualitative health care services thrives on large pools of funds and not on fragmented pools as it were.”
He said another solution is that HMOs could warehouse their thinly spread enrollees and prune down the number of providers on the private health insurance programme.
Ewenla said they could thereafter embark on systematic redistribution of their enrollees in order to achieve a reasonable volume of enrollees being given to a particular facility, adding that it would address the inflationary issues that were raised by the healthcare providers.
He said HMOs may also review the payment system adopted in order to consider a better payment system that would guarantee the provision of qualitative healthcare services which is the fulcrum of the health insurance programme.
