The National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) says it has reconciled over N2 billion unpaid claims accrued by Health Maintenance Organisations (HMOs) for Healthcare Service Providers (HSPs).
The General Manager, Enforcement Department, NHIS, Mr Muhammad Ghali, made this known while speaking with newsmen on the sidelines of a stakeholders’ forum on Tuesday in Kano.
Ghali said the amount was recovered by a special committee set up by the management of the scheme, sequel to complaints by the HSPs over backlog payment of services rendered to its enrollees.
He said over N2 billion was recovered through reconciliation exercise conducted between June and July
“Before the new management, led by Prof. Nasiru Sambo, NHIS recorded a lot of complaints by the HSPs, and it is subjecting our enrollees to hardship. When asked, they would say some other services that they rendered to the enrollees, the HMO did not pay, and this is coming to an unbearable level. So, the management came up with this principle of reconciliation whereby we collected all debts due to the HSPs within the period of 2019”.
According to him, as at September 2020, over N2 billion has been recovered from the HMOs as payment to the HSP.
“A letter of non-indebtedness was issued to the HMOs that completed payment of its debt. The exercise is still ongoing across the 36 states and FCT, because there are some HMOs that are yet to complete payment”.
The forum was organised to create awareness on the Group, Family, Individual (GIF-SHIP) programme, initiated to mobilise participation in the scheme across the country.
Ghali said the forum was also designed to generate feedback from the stakeholders on how to fine-tune its programmes for effective service delivery.
