Members of Parliament will next month embark on fresh bench-marking tripsin preparation for the re-introduction of the botched National Health Insurance Bill, members of the parliamentary health committee have revealed.
According to Joel Ssebikali Yoweri, the Vice Chairperson of the committee, the thirty-six member team will travel to different countries starting with Rwanda where they will be visiting in December. They will visit neighboring Tanzania and Kenya in January, 2023.
He reveals that they have discussed with the Speaker Anita Among to have this process done as fast as possible considering the need for the law.
Speaking at the opening of the two-day National Community Health Financing Conference in Kampala on Thursday, Fredrick Makaire, the Executive Director Save for Health Uganda, an NGO that coordinates community health insurance schemes across the country said there’s no need for fresh benchmarking as there’s already enough data gathered over the last more than fifteen years of failed attempts to introduce the law.
But, Ssebikali says while Parliament has done such benchmarking trips before to learn from how other countries are running insurance schemes, the team of members have been changing and currently only three of them have ever been involved in such trips. Asked whether there are no reports where members can read from and acquaint themselves with what happened before, he says there might be changes in those countries systems that they need to see physically in order to make proper observations.
Previously, MPs had visited Rwanda, Namibia, Ghana and France to benchmark for the bill that was passed by parliament in 2021 only to be rejected by president Museveni who refused to accent to it.
Though the President didn’t give reasons for his action, Makaire says the President was misled and wasn’t given enough information about the importance of health insurance as the private sector who feared that the scheme would deprive them of business.
Currently, according to Dr. Charles Olaro, the Director curative Services in the Ministry of Health, they are reviewing the bill and that it will soon be resubmitted. He says the plan is to provide key health services which he referred to as a service package noting that they won’t be providing everything under the scheme.
He noted that they are ensuring that everything that missed in the 2021 bill including the fate of community health schemes and private providers are well catered for in the new document.
For Makaire, they are now in the process of gathering ideas to draft a document that they will submit to the ministry of health specifying the role that community schemes can play when the national insurance schemes is put in place.
He for instance says they can play a role of distribution and collection agents given the fact that these schemes since they already have structures right from the village to district level where people have been contributing money to respective schemes.
