Health Insured Without Health Insurance

MY BEEF: All members of my community within my chiefdom are agreed congress is evil. Congress is evil because members of the community are not receiving the health delivery service they have paid health insurance premiums to be provided. Members of a poor village community have had healthcare taken away from them. My compatriots, if you doubt me, I can take you to the community so you can see for yourself the dejection and misery in the faces of the people � women, children, men, the old and the infirm, including buruli ulcer victims and AIDS orphans. For a fact, he who always calls my compatriots brothers and sisters has decided that members of my community are not, cannot and must not be brothers and sisters. His NHIS people, the ones who threw Kufuor appointees out and installed because they see eye to eye with him, have stopped NHIS cards being accepted at the village clinic. Through their own effort, the community had built the facility with the full support and approval of the Ghana Health Service. It wouldn�t open until its personnel had undergone six weeks training in NHIS implementation procedures. Maybe we should have lobbied for its inclusion in the dog born sod-cutting and commissioning whimsical escapades. I am sure our insurance cards would have been accepted by now. Anytime you ask Atta�s insurance people, the ones they put there, after they have forcibly sacked the Kufour people, they tell you Accra people will have to inspect the place; a place established by the government itself, if the NHIS is to be operational. The disabled, aged and infirm in the community don�t get LEAP. There is no MMT service. The community is deprived of school feeding. They brought 20 uniforms for 200 schoolchildren. And capitation grant arrives once in a blue moon. In short, the dog born people are do hwee people. They talk big, do little for the motherland. The cocoa or gold or oil money builds mansions for congresspeople, ferries girlfriends and boyfriends around and stuffs whatever is left in suya or chinchinga for bulging stomachs and cheeks. Congresspeople are shameless talkers. Otherwise, they who have deprived my people of what is due them from the annual premiums they have already paid for health insurance dare not mention a one-time premium payment. No decent person with integrity dares lie like that. I have heard professional actuaries say it will not work. I have heard the providers, doctors, pharmacists and the community nurses, among other health professionals say it will not work. Yet they persist. Now I will tell you why they are insisting that it will work when they know it will not. Their number one reason is to campaign in 2012 that they have fulfilled a promise; a promise they did not think before they made. That will be in line with their deed without thought, lie through your teeth operandi. Secondly, they know they will lose election 2012. The ploy is, therefore, to set a trap for attacking a non-congress post-2012 government for having collapsed a congress-established one-time premium policy. Thirdly, in their do-little mode, they want to do only small, small projects so they can squander the big oil and cocoa and gold money on health insurance. That will leave only enough to build mansions and stuff their cheeks. Congress wanton and capricious acts threw out the baby with the bath water, sacking everyone who had been appointed to an NHIS administrative position. The result is the cash and carry for my community, a product of people not knowing what to do but trying to solve problems that they have created by their groping approaches to problem-solving. My compatriots, this is painful. A suffering village community struggles through self-help to construct a health facility recognized by the state. This is no private venture which the state is being requested to approve. In fact, it was approved before it was established. The community is being punished by withdrawing their NHIS accreditation simply because the NHIS administration does not know what to do. What the congresspeople are talking is that they will have to send a team from Accra, 280 kilometres to the village, for data that will be processed over months for a decision on whether their insurance cards will be accepted or not. I am sure my people are praying that these heartless people in charge of the motherland�s affairs will be thrown out in 2012. My compatriots, please help and throw them out because otherwise they will be taking from the poor like my people so that they can build their mansions and stuff their cheeks. It is cash and carry in the village while people are travelling to South Africa and Britain and wherever for medical attention because they are dog borns.