It’s very clear that Mr Hakainde Hichilema and his UPND government don’t know where they are headed, and that is very dangerous. Their greatest achievement is directionless leadership. Mr Hichilema appears to be in control, but no one knows where he is leading. We all make mistakes.
But few people have been consistently wrong on all the great issues that faced our nation over the last half decade as Mr Hichilema has. Blunders are everywhere. Wherever one turns, there’s a crisis – the body, electricity, diesel, soccer, cost of living, health services, and so on and so forth. Today, there’s a very serious crisis at NHIMA threatening the lives of so many people.
At the rate they are mismanaging NHIMA, it will become very difficult to rescue it even by a new government.
The failure to pay hospitals is a symptom of deeper misgovernance and gross incompetence on the part of Mr Hichilema and his UPNDgovernment.
NHIMA has two many internal ailments; no interest and capacity to collect contributions, and sadly, absent is cost control.
Instead of increasing collections, they removed key diseases from their list. Instead of deploying collection systems, they are now delaying paying private hospitals.
Instead of finding innovative medical equipment financing methods, they are directly procuring medical equipment paying huge upfront sums, thereby taking money meant to pay claims to private hospitals.
It’s a sad state of affairs. In the original design of NHIMA, with universal access to quality health care at the core, private health facilities were critical players. Because of their ability to expand quickly and offer better quality than public health facilities, it incorporated a 30-day FIFO ( First In First Out) robust claims payment system. All these seem to have been abandoned. It also incorporated effective claims fraud detection, prevention, and management protocols. Again, these were diluted, and we saw the blame shifted to private health facilities.
Most critically, there was a claims collection and management model that should have expanded collections even at the current 1%. The model was dumped as “private sector” obsession in a parastatal where BOMA won’t allow NHIMA to collapse even if no collections were made.
At this point, the government must immediately release the Statutory Instrument to increase the contribution rate from 1% to 2.5% and the contribution base from base to gross salary. On condition that management and the board have a tight contribution collection and management strategy, and that claims and overhead costs are reigned in .
Fred M’membe
President of the Socialist Party
There you go again Ba Fledi with your Socialist Ideologies…