'Cash and Carry' system threatens health delivery – Solomon Kotei

The inability of successive governments to sustain the laudable concept of National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) introduced by Kufour’s administration is obviously having negative impact in the health delivery system as the scheme is virtually on the verge of collapse and Cash and Carry resurfaced in all health institutions across the country as a result of non-payment of services rendered by the service providers to government.

Mr Solomon Kotei, General Secretary of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union-Ghana (ICU-Ghana) made this startling revelation when he addressed the Greater Accra Regional conference of ICU-Ghana in Accra to end its nationwide regional conferences.

He explained that the initial stages of the scheme saw enthusiasm in the public despite the fact that it excluded some critical illnesses like cancer, cardiovascular, liver, kidney, prostate etc, a lot of the citizens were able to access the basic services provided under the NHIS.

According to Mr. Kotei, the implications of these is that the ordinary citizen cannot access healthcare and therefore retard productivity in all spheres of the economy and appeal to the government to revive the scheme forthwith.

The banking, microfinance and small loans companies clean-up exercise undertaken by Bank of Ghana (BoG) has left in its trail huge unemployment and livelihood of the affected and families left in limbo.

The ICU-Ghana General Secretary said the government should speed up the cases of these confiscated institutions involved and those found not guilty in any violations of BoG regulations returned to them.

This, the General Secretary believed will help heal the wounds of the afflicted and those traumatized in the course of the exercise.

On tax exemption, he said it is a move to relieve workers of some of their tax obligations since government has made provision for tax exemption upon application and urged all workers on the privilege tax exemption to avail themselves to that opportunity to earn the benefit by filling their tax returns with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) regularly.