A minority in Parliament has criticized the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA)’s proposal to allocate GH₵245 million for the procurement of Ghana Cards for children aged 6 to 14 years.
According to NHIA, providing these cards to children in this age group will eliminate the need to print separate National Health Insurance cards.
But speaking in parliament on Friday, March 22, former minority leader Haruna Idris condemned the decision as reckless.
He maintained that the NHIA’s primary responsibility should be to resolve claims rather than divert funds to purchase Ghana Cards.
Mr Idris said the state was already working on acquiring the Ghana Card and questioned the logic behind the NHIA’s decision to duplicate efforts and spend additional funds on data procurement.
“We need more answers from the National Identification Authority and Health Insurance. I don’t think this province’s resources are being used well,” Idris said.
Minority Leader Kwame Governs Agboza has called for a parliamentary audit into what he claims is the NHIA’s high spending on ICT-related expenses.
He expressed concern that the NHIA has allocated close to 1 billion Ghanaian cedis for ICT-related projects, including claims processing centres, biometric ID card verification systems, management information systems, telecare service platforms, insurance claims, etc. He cited various expenditures such as data collection.
Mr. Agboza stressed that despite requests for an independent audit of the NHIS system, the authorities have not responded.
“Mr. Speaker, how much money is even the Ministry of Communications spending on ICT and other things?” Mr. Speaker, we have asked the NHIS to conduct an independent audit of the system and report to Parliament. This is not the first time.
“As we speak, they are failing to audit and failing to provide information to Congress, so we are arguing that Congress should introduce its own audit into this matter.” he said.
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