The National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) has send it is working with some pharmaceutical companies to provide relief for the enrollees who suffer cancer disease across the country.
The Director General of NHIA Mohammed Sambo who stated this at a workshop organized for desk officers of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) in Abuja, yesterday said the authority has since engaged some companies like The Reach in the provision of cancer drugs, stating that more potent drugs has been provided by other companies in the recent time.
Represented at the event by the General Manager, Formal Sector Program, Dr. Eke Jonathan, the Director General said “The formal sector program provides coverage for most people that are working for both the organized private sector and the public sector.
“The reforms happening is to see that every Nigerian irrespective of their social economic status, tribe or religion are covered and have access to good quality health care without having to bear the challenges of paying for them.
“The essence of the meeting today is to sensitize the desk officers who we use to represent our enrollees at the various MDAs; tell them about the new things so that they can go back to their respective MDAs to begin to educate the people about all the things happening in the NHIA,and other things that they need to know and how the program works.
“Ab initio, cancer treatment has always been covered but people did not know. When we talk about cancer care a lot of people go to the drugs but we know that a lot of the expenditure that they do in terms of cancer therapy go to drugs. What we used to have before within the NHIS, is that, we used to have drugs for cancer, but they were the first generation drugs cytotoxics.
“But there are newer generation drugs that are in the market now, and that have better efficacy to take care of a lot of these cancers.
“The Roach partnership is giving us some of the very potent drugs that we can use for some forms of cancer. However, there are a lot of other pharmaceutical companies that are coming in, not just for cancer.
“That fits within the framework of a bigger picture, which is the national health medicine supply. We are liaising with most of the pharmaceutical companies to provide drugs for our enrollees.
“When you do certain surgeries that are for cancer, it is still part of cancer treatment. There are so many ways to treat cancer, even radiotherapy, drugs, surgeries, they are already covered.
“For cancer care we have a cost sharing approach to it. Even with the work we are doing with Roach; Roach is taking 50 per cent of the cost, NHIA will take 30 per cent, and the enrollee will take 20 per cent of the cost, which is something. If you look at it in terms of percentage, they have already taken away 80 per cent of the cost from the enrollee. It is a good way to start because these things are very expensive. The aim is to reduce the burden on the patient.
“Because cancer treatment is a super specialty thing, so it is not every hospital that takes care of it. So, we have certain facilities that we have started to deal with. I know University of Benin is there, UNTH and some other hospitals across the country because these are referral cases; primary and secondary providers cannot take care of cancer treatment.”
Speaking, Dr. Comfort Adeosun, Director Occupational Health, Safety and Environment of the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation, representing the Permanent Secretary, Service Welfare Office, Mahmud Cambari, said the event was organized in collaboration with the National Health Insurance Authority to educate and provide information that will inform decision making by the formal sector enrollees where they fall into as civil servants.
She said ” If this is not done, it will affect the implementation of the new Act. So, in order to bridge that gap we have organized this workshop.
“The people brought here today are the NHIA Desk Officers. These Desk Officers are your point of contacts when you get to any MDA. These officers need to know that things have changed since the NHIA Act was signed in August 2022.”
