TEMA SERVICE PROVIDERS INFLATE NHIS BILLS (PAGE 30)

The Manager of the Tema National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Mrs Alice Obeng, has decried the submission of inflated bills by service providers in the metropolis, culminating in debts to the scheme.
She said as of June 2009, the scheme owed service providers over GH¢1million, being payments for the second quarter of the year.
Mrs Obeng was speaking to the Daily Graphic in an interview on the performance of the scheme in the Tema metropolis.
She stated that service providers delayed in submitting bills, and that instead of presenting them on a quarterly basis, they accumulated them without indicating what belonged to a particular period.
Mrs Obeng said itemised medical treatments were not clearly indicated to make assessment easy to understand.
She therefore, appealed to service providers to go by the laid- down regulations to make it easy for the scheme to work on the bills on time to prevent vetting of what had been submitted.
The scheme manager said because of improper billing, the scheme had always paid less than what it owed.
Mrs Obeng said the scheme received GH¢ 747,271.06 last Monday August 31, 2009 as payment for the third quarter, but it would have to use the amount to defray some of the debts.
She said the metropolis had 52 active facilities made up of five government health facilities and 47 private ones caring for 374,571 people as of June 2009.
The state-owned facilities are the Tema General Hospital , Tema Polyclinic , Tema Manhean Health Centre , Ashaiman Health Post and the Oyibi Health Post, while the others are private hospitals, clinics and pharmacies.
Mrs Obeng stated that since the inception of the scheme in 2004, over 529,000 people were targeted to be under as per the 2000 Census, but expressed regret that some residents had not renewed their membership of the scheme after it expired, thereby reducing the membership to 374,571 .
She said the scheme had started registering members for the new system which would be renewed every year for a period of five years until the permanent cards came into operation .
Mrs Obeng urged the service providers to do proper billing, avoid delays and deliver on time for early reimbursement.
She also called on patients who sought medical care at the various facilities to be patient with the service providers because they needed to go through records to ascertain that they were really members of the scheme .