This week, the Ministry of Health finally found funds to publish draft rules seeking to make a raft of changes to the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF).
If the new proposals become law, Kenyans who have a roof over their heads in traffic will have to pay more to help those who get rained on while trekking to industrial area to eat scrap metal for breakfast.
Ideally, there shouldn’t be a problem with those who’re already blessed to share with those who’re still creating room for blessings to enter. It’s the Godly thing to do, only that God loves cheerful givers and helping the needy under government duress isn’t close to what the Holy Book recommended.
This is why Kenyans need to take advantage of the public participation window offered by the NHIF to present their views on the new proposals, because we live in a country where those who make laws don’t have public interest at heart and those who have public interest at heart aren’t interested in how laws are made.
We all need everyone healthy and alive in the pool of those who should be auctioned if we don’t repay Kenya’s bilateral loans. For us to spread our risks, therefore, it’s in our collective interest to give views on what we’d love our new health insurance scheme to look like.
Animal cruelty
One of the markers of an agreeable health insurance scheme is its ability to fight Kenya’s number one disease – the disease of poverty.
Poverty is very bad. Poverty can make your donkey kick you in soft places and you can’t retaliate for fear of being fired from work for animal cruelty, but a Prime Minister will be clapped for when he’s caught breaking stringent Covid-19 rules he himself signed onto.
In Kenya, if you’re poor, you can’t even ask the hospital nurse why they don’t have surgical gloves for midwives bending their spine to ensure one-hundred-per-cent transition from pregnancy to childbirth.
You’d be forced to weigh your words in front of government officials who are overworked and underpaid for you risk being arrested for offering guidance and counselling services when you don’t have a practising certificate.
Sickness doesn’t care whether you’re waiting for your historic wheelbarrows in six months’ time, or for a white dove to deliver your choicest of oranges.
New NHIF scheme
When you’re sick all you want is to stretch your arm outside your window and tap the standby ambulance driver to wheel you to the triage. If the NHIF service isn’t covering for emergency ambulance services then there’s no difference between it and a broken walking stick.
The new NHIF scheme, therefore, should cover the complete spectrum of physical, mental and social wellbeing. If my boss keeps appearing in my sleep in oversized hoodie while carrying a menacing pitch-folk and it affects my performance at work, the new NHIF scheme should be able to buy me a therapist who has many years’ experience in showing demons the directions to the sea.
A health insurance scheme that cannot strike out the worry whenever I fall sick isn’t the solution Kenyans are looking for and certainly not the answer to the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) dilemma.
Kenyans will forgive the new NHIF scheme if they failed in all their proposals but came up with a permanent solution to the stressful public fundraisers for medical bills that have liquidated people’s investments and solidified their place in misery.
If we’re going to dig deep into our pockets to finance a healthcare insurance scheme that works, let the NHIF use the extra cash to grow firm legs for it to meet us halfway to hospital when we desperately need it. BY DAILY NATION