BREAKING THE SILENCE, 2014 Breaking The Silence | Page 42

...“look let us
have a scheme
whereby people
can pay for their
insurance policy
by text, by
airtime”.
clever or some unkind person
changed that word 'shall' to 'may'
and that more or less ruined the Act
as there was no compelling law, it
was optional. So, it's been an Act
without a solid backbone and we've
tried to work with it. It's been
difficult but most of what we've
done regarding legislative
amendment from 1999 has been to
change that word 'may' back to
'shall'.
scheme whereby people can pay for
their insurance policy by text, by
airtime”. That is already being rolled
out and managed by a financial
service aggregator company.
Currently, MTN says they will take
N5 from my phone every day for
mobile health insurance. Do you
think that is sustainable?
profit in excess of what they paid
for. They have revenue estimated
over 4-5 Billion Naira a day.
This thing, the president is going to
launch it and we hope that after a
while there will be a law that will
ensure that most people subscribe
to one health insurance scheme or
the other.
So how do you think we can
expand this coverage? Don't you think people would get
tired? As medical students/ intending
medical practitioners, is there any
role we have to play in the whole
concept of Universal health
provision?
Under the leadership of Dr. Femi
Thomas, the Executive Secretary of
the NHIS, there is an agreement
with all the mobile networks: Airtel,
Glo, Etisalat and MTN who have
over a hundred million people
enrolled. He said, “look let us have a You know when the mobile phone
networks came in 1999, people said
“it can't work; I'm not going to bid”.
Most companies bided 287 million
dollars, and within two years they
had made their money back. Every
year now, MTN makes a declared I usually take medical students
when they come to my hospital in
Obalende and I always make sure I
tell them, “Today I'm not going to
discuss cardiology or neurology
with you, and I'm going to tell you
something that has made many of
AMSUL Digest 2014
It's not N5, N35!