All 36 state governors in the nation have been instructed by the National Healthcare Insurance Authority (NHIA) to create National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) agencies in their various states to offer insurance coverage to the populace.

This is to guarantee that the recently passed National Health Insurance Scheme enrolls 83 million underprivileged Nigerians.

In an effort to achieve universal coverage, the National Health Insurance Scheme will cover at least 83 million low-income Nigerians, according to Prof. Nasir Mohammed Sambo, Director General of NHIA, who was speaking after receiving an award at the National Awards ceremony of the Health Care Providers Association of Nigeria (HCPAN) in Lagos. He claims that in order to guarantee the provision of high-quality healthcare throughout the nation, NHIA will work with state governments’ health insurance programs to accredit primary and secondary healthcare facilities and enroll Nigerians in the program.

To improve data collecting, monitoring, and quality assurance, the new law also gives the NHIA and state governments the ability to create information management systems and digital records.

According to Sambo, private health insurance is a process in which HMOs purchase medical services for interested parties in accordance with pre-established agreements.

Sambo noted that the main goals of social health insurance were to limit the rising cost of health care services and protect people from the financial hardships of high medical bills. Sambo claimed that NHIS was the only legally recognized body that has the authority to come up with service tariffs for health insurance in the country.

However, Sambo expressed disapproval over the system’s toleration of HMOs running “Private Health Insurance,” which he claimed caused distortions in the execution of social health insurance, but expressed optimism that the expected passage of the NHIS bill making health insurance mandatory will permanently resolve all such distortions.

“The only way for every Nigerian to get access to high-quality, reasonably priced healthcare is through social health insurance. Therefore, Sambo added, “anything that may jeopardize the efficient running of the social health insurance plan in Nigeria must be removed.

In addition to presenting a paper on the “Birth of NHIA, Paradigm-shift, Importance, Relevance, Impact and Contributions to achieving UHC in Nigeria,” the General Manager of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Olufemi Akingbade, stated that the primary goal of NHIS is to guarantee that every Nigerian has access to high-quality, reasonably priced healthcare services.

According to Akingbade, during implementation it was discovered that the constitutional health provisions (recurrent/exclusive legislative lists) as well as the voluntary disposition to health insurance were undermining the NHIS Act.