Usman Yusuf, executive secretary, National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), says he is ready to fight corruption, impunity and inefficiency in the scheme.
Yusuf stated this while he led the management of the scheme on a courtesy visit to the chairman of Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), Ekpo Nta, in Abuja.
Yusuf explained that the meeting was geared towards consensus building and support among stakeholders towards repositioning the scheme for effective service delivery.
Yusuf, in a statement released by NHIS on Thursday, said his mandate, as the executive secretary was to be a good custodian of people’s wealth and by extension sanitise the NHIS and make it work for everybody.
“I have a duty to reposition this noble institution that all Nigerians can be proud of,” Yusuf said.
He also decried the irregularities operated among the HMOs and ill-treatment enrollees encounter in receiving services at the hospitals, saying the institution had not done well in the past, as some Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) and health care providers’ treat enrollees like lepers.
He stressed that NHIS as an institution had paid so much money to the HMOs from 2005 till date, and there was nothing to show for it.
The executive secretary then called on the leadership of ICPC to commence the process of probing the activities of NHIS and HMOs, who in one way or another had defrauded the system and short-changed enrollees.
He said that HMOs had returned over 92 percent of the money owned to NHIS, but however requested the full cooperation of the leadership ICPC to purge the endemic corruption embedded in NHIS.
In his response, the ICPC chairman, Ekpo Nta, who was represented by commission’s secretary, Elvis Oglafa, commended the executive secretary for his sincerity and doggedness in the fight against corruption in NHIS and repositioning the scheme for better service delivery.
He assured the management of NHIS of ICPC’s support in the fight against corruption in NHIS.
