SHA will bring equality; President Ruto
President William Ruto on Sunday made a passionate plea to Kenyans urging them to register with the Social Health Authority (SHA)
President William Ruto on Sunday made a passionate plea to Kenyans urging them to register with the Social Health Authority (SHA).
Speaking during a church service in Khwisero, Kakamega, President Ruto reiterated that the unwelcome healthcare scheme will aid the government in streamlining healthcare services in the nation.
He said that the scheme will allow Kenyans to fairly access healthcare attention as the government will cater for the vulnerable and poverty-stricken citizens.
“We want to bring equality. Every Kenyan should register themselves. We only had about 9 million Kenyans on NHIF while everyone was suffering. About 14 million Kenyans have registered to the new scheme,” he said.
The president further noted that the registration will help the government collect critical data to help disburse medical kits and manpower proportional to the area population.
“We will also know if you are able to pay and if you do not the government will cater for your expenses,” he added.
He noted that the now-defunct National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) denied many Kenyans fair access to medical services, adding that the scheme only favoured the financially able and ostracised the impoverished.
“We have had problems with NHIF and it has a pending debt of Ksh.30 billion because the services they provided costed more than the money accessed through that programme,” he noted.
Ruto’s sentiments were echoed by Health Cabinet Secretary (CS) Deborah Barasa, who praised the scheme’s efficiency, noting that it is already helping many Kenyans.
“We have gone to most hospitals and we have witnessed that this scheme is working. Register so that you witness it yourselves. Do not listen to what is being said on radios and the media,” she said.
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The transition has been met with heavy contention from Kenyans as the government has been at pains to explain how patients will access healthcare services and how a high monthly deduction will be made to the new health fund.
Questions remain unanswered about the criteria that will be used to assess how informal sector households will be banded to determine their annual contributions to the health fund as all employed Kenyans will remit 2.75% of their monthly pay to the scheme.
CS Barasa, after a lengthy scattered defence before the Parliament’s Health Committee, said that payments will be made in bands as different amounts will be deducted in each category.
“We will give you the report for the bands but what I can assure you is that the accuracy is 95%,” she said after failing to elucidate how the banding will work.
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