NHIS helps; ignore the naysayers and get registered – Ghanaians told

The honourable Presiding Member (PM) of the Mfantseman Municipal Assembly (MMA) has advised Ghanaians to ignore the naysayers and get themselves registered with the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), for it helps.

According to him, the scheme is not free from flaws like any other policy. Still, those intermittent challenges should not be “the basis for condemning the entire policy because the health insurance really helps….in fact one would not get to know its importance until he or she gets seriously sick…because yes, people complain about some of the drugs not being covered by the scheme and other things but they should know that the scheme goes beyond the medicines….there are other services that someone without the NHIS card would pay that those with would not pay so I encourage all to get registered.”

Mr Alex Kojo Appiah, who doubles as the Assembly member for Mankessim Edumadze, was addressing beneficiaries of a free NHIS registration exercise organised by a non-governmental humanitarian group called Adwowa Gyaaba Foundation (AGF) in collaboration with the Anomabo chapter of the Boys and Girls Club of Ghana at Ogoekrom, a farming community and suburb of Anomabo in the Mfantseman municipality of the Central Region.

He then charged them to be cautious and much more concerned with the names they use to register and their spellings “because one thing I realised when I was working with the scheme as an agent was that many people used any name they wanted to register … forgetting that that’s what is going to be used to identify them forever so please use your official names, especially those on your documents like Ghana card, birth certs, drivers license etc. so that your identity will be one.”

Miss Mabel Dontwi, a mental health officer, who was there to sensitise the aged among the beneficiaries on stress management, urged them to be content with whatever they have and not to be swayed by their colleagues’ wealth, which she said could contribute to brain stress which eventually results in getting high blood pressure.

According to the foundation’s director of operations, Isaac Kweku Quainoo, the foundation’s CEO, Mr Francis Ogoe, instituted the foundation to honour his late mother, Adwowa Gyaaba, who could not live to reap the fruit of her labour. It is purposely to put smiles on the faces of the aged and the vulnerable, and said the exercise was part of the quarterly humanitarian activities of the foundation. This one was held as part of activities to commemorate this year’s Giving Tuesday.

About 200 people were registered in the scheme, with over 90 expired cards renewed for the beneficiaries drawn from Ogoekrom, Oboadze and Anomansa.

Secondhand dresses, shoes and socks were distributed to the pupils of Oboadze M/A basic school.

Some of the beneficiaries who spoke with the media described the offer as timely and expressed their sincere gratitude to the foundation.

“We are much grateful to the group for this overwhelming gesture, we’re short of words because we haven’t seen such thing before…. we’re so happy and relieved because most of us in these communities are not having because from here to Saltpond is not a small journey, the transport cost, and when you go too, you’d have to sit there for almost the whole day and sometimes too you don’t get your card after wasting those hours and money…so for the foundation to bring this to our doorsteps and for free, we say may God bless them,” a middle age beneficiary expressed.

Source: thenewsroomonline