By Sola Ogundipe

The National Mobile Health Insurance Programme, NMHIP, launched last year under the National Health Insurance Scheme, NHIS, is being undermined by series of bureaucratic bottlenecks and disagreements between identity managers over exorbitant administrative charges demanded and Mobile Network Operators.

The NMHIP introduced in 2014, to remove physical and financial barriers to registration under the NHIS from a mobile phone, is currently functioning sub-optimally.

Financial bureaucracy stalls mobile health insurance programme.

The Acting Executive Secretary of the NHIS, Mr Femi Akingbade, said the spread of the programme had been slowed and admitted that the scheme was experiencing delivery failure as a result.

Akingbade who spoke to journalists in Abuja, weekend, said the Scheme had not been optimally providing the mobile health insurance payments and fees accruing from agreed distribution of funds were being reduce to nothing by the high administrative charges on mobile network operators.

He said the programme was experiencing delivery failure because the stakeholders seem not to totally agree with the payments and fees that are coming to them based on the agreed distribution of the funds that are being contributed.

“This can be attributed to a lot of things because we found out that because of the Mobile Network Operators involved, there are lots of government charges that they need to pay and a lot of the fees are going into administrative charges which we are trying to reduce,” he explained.

The Executive Secretary explained that the mobile health insurance programme required the NHIS to tap into the tele-density of nearly 120 million Nigerians registered on mobile networks, and link phone numbers to existing data already captured by operators during the period of SIM card registration.

“We need to collaborate with the Nigeria Communications Commission, NCC, National Identity Management Corporation, NIMC, Mobile Network Operators, and lots of other agencies that are into identity management and that actually slowed the process which we are actually working on.”

Akingbade said the NHIS is hoping to have access to the database in question, in order to rule out the need to capture fresh biometrics for new enrolees on the mobile health insurance.

“One of the things that we are still trying to work on and implore NCC to do is to release that data base for us for access to those data as it saves us a lot in recreating the wheel.

“They have already done a biometric registration and have the details of people that own these lines. What we are now saying is that if somebody that owns a line wants to register for NMHIP, please give me the data so that I don’t need to go ahead to start capturing a new biometric data.”

The NHIS and NIMC are collaborating on the harmonisation of the two data bases with the aim of facilitating easier registration.

The Scheme easier would directly reimburse all those already registered for the NMHIP. At least 20 Lagos hospitals were chosen to pilot the reimbursement of mobile health insurance affected by the development.