The Chief Executive Officer of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), Nathaniel Otoo, has given assurances the authority is currently working at reducing the deficits in the scheme to make it more effective.
The NHIA’s expenditure has been consistently exceeding its income for the past six years, and this situation has created huge deficit gaps for the scheme.
[contextly_sidebar id=”NYfiGdGOTBKcGpGvKEi5kc9JBmDKOR0D”]But Nathanial Otoo in an interview with Bernard Avle on ‘The Ghana Report’ programme on Viasat 1 Television, said the scheme will reverse the trend of widening deficit in 2016.
According to Mr. Otoo, the NHIA will be focusing its efforts on improving forecasting strategy.
“The gap is going to reduce based on a number of things… it is going to be reduced on how we analyze and forecast. It is also going to reduce because we are doing a lot to check cost.”
Even factoring in inflation, Mr. Otoo is of the view that the operational expenditure of the NHIA will stagnate or reduce this year.
“In the year 2016, operation expenditures are going to either stagnate or reduce. You would see that there is an inflationary situation whereby the costs should have gone up naturally, but this year, we are going to either stagnate them or let them go down,” he explained.
The NHIA boss indicated that forecasting was key to addressing the deficit gap and this, coupled with non-traditional sources of income, will help them close the deficit gap.
“The more accurate we are in forecasting, the better we can tell where the gap will be. We have been able to improve our forecasting and this year 2016, because of that improvement in forecasting, cost control and the fact that we are getting small amounts of income from non-traditional sources is what is going to close the gap a little bit.”
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By Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana