Former Minister of Health, Alex Segbefia has said the Mahama government had a strategy to clear the GHc100 million debt in the health sector that the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) is struggling with.
According to him, the proposal had a clear roadmap to paying the debt or reducing it to the barest minimum.
“…We were aware of the debt that was going to come, we were aware of the payments and we had a formula and system to deal with. But unfortunately there was a change of government and they [NPP] made all manner of promises that they had clear plan to deal with it. The question now is that what is the plan for the current government?”
Mr. Segbefia made the remark on the on Friday in relation to a claim by the current Health Minister, who complained that the NPP government is struggling to clear the over GHc100 million debt left by the Mahama-government in the sector.
“…The bottom line is that the previous government has committed debts not in the Ministry of Finance, just Ministry of Health…There is a debt overhang of close to about 134 million Ghana cedis as at the end of December 2016…The little goods and services that we got this year, we had to pay out of 53 million, 43 million to ensure that we pay for co funding to give us vaccines so that is the grim situation,” the Minister said.
But speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show, Mr. Segbefia said the NDC government envisioned the debt and strategized on how to deal with it.
The former Health Minister explained that during their time in power, the NDC government made ten percent of total NHIA allocation to the Health Ministry for the clearing of debts of essential vaccines and other commitments.
He added that the NDC government also decided to make some allocations from the petroleum levy to support the NHIA to bridge it funding gap but could not implement it because they were kicked out of power.
“The way we got round this was that when the NHIA pay, ten percent of the amount paid to the NHIA is made available to the ministry to deal with issues such as this. And so we had put in place a system whereby funding for payment of essential vaccines were to come from allocations which was given to NHIA.”
He said they realized that “if we got all the money, because of the increased uses of the NHIA, all the monies that were coming from the formula we would still have a funding gap or shortage within then NHIA.”
“It is for this reason that the NDC-led administration decided and you heard it in our manifesto that we were going to take money from the petroleum levy to add to the existing NHIA bill which would have also increased the ten percent that was supposed to given and would deal with this payment that we have make for the essential drugs and also give the NHIA the extra funding that it requires,” he added.
He however called on the current Minister to implement the proposal or better still implement recommendations from a report commissioned by the Mahama government into the NHIA on how to increase its revenue.
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
