The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has asked President John Mahama and his National Democratic Congress (NDC) to apologise to Ghanaians for failing to fulfill the ruling party?s manifesto promise on one-time premium under the National Health Insurance Scheme.
According to the NPP, it was obvious that the NDC government could not implement the one-time premium but was always standing against other parties who were capable of rolling out laudable policies that would bring respite to the people.
?Ghanaians demand an apology from the President for failing in the last four years to implement the flagship manifesto promise of the NDC in 2008, which was to introduce one-time premium for NHIS users,? Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, the NPP?s Director of Elections and MP for Manhyia, said in a statement.
Reacting to President Mahama?s purported statement on Sunday that the NPP?s proposal to provide free healthcare to children less than 18 years was in contrast to the National Health Insurance Authority law, Dr Prempeh said, ?The President must get his facts right and stop embarrassing the presidency with some of his ill-informed statements.?
He noted, ?There exists no administrative directive issued in 2009 when it already existed from July 2008,? as the president had suggested, saying, ?The NPP has been very consistent on what we plan to do in order to move Ghana forward. And we have been able to do so because we are committed to what we say we will do.?
He stated that what the NPP flag-bearer, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, had done was ?essentially to restate two of his key manifesto pledges of 2008 to: offer free secondary education to every child and free healthcare under the NHIS to every Ghanaian child under the age of 18.?
?None of the two policies are currently in place so we are not at all sure what the President is talking about,? the Manhyia MP argued.
He said that President Mahama?s ?misfired criticism only goes to show that in John Dramani Mahama, Ghanaians have a President who has really lost touch with the concerns and aspiration of the ordinary people.
?We have a president who does not seem to know what time it is and only prefers to add to the current sufferings of the masses by saying, as he did at his IEA Evening Encounter, that under this NDC III government, ?Ghanaians have enjoyed an unprecedented quality of life.??
He said the NPP believed that access to social services should be on the basis of need, and that government had a duty to keep its people healthy, adding, ?We are proud that we are helping to create a society of fairness and opportunities for everyone, including the most vulnerable.?
Dr Prempeh, a medical doctor, said the NHIS was an important social intervention which had been ?completely abandoned by the NDC government after 2009 as they struggled in vain to implement their dead-from-birth one-term insurance premium,? adding, ?They have never funded this laudable Kufuor government policy.?
He stated that even though parliament had successfully amended the new NHIA Bill to have the decoupling initiative added before its recent passage, the President was yet to give his assent to the bill for it to become law, to pave the way for implementation.
?Our advice to President Mahama is this: please concentrate on appending your signature to the bill, failing which Akufo-Addo will do so and make sure that our long-standing pledge to offer free NHIS to every Ghanaian child becomes a reality.
?The President could do well to sack those who gave him that poor and expensive advice to send 250 Ghanaian students to Cuba at the kind of cost which, if wisely invested, would have educated nearly a thousand Ghanaian medical students here in Ghana and, in the process, strengthening the capacity of our own medical schools,? he stressed.
He advised the President to sack his advisors who kept telling him that the one-time premium was doable, adding, ?Better still, the President should sack himself for advising his late predecessor that he could bring Koreans to Ghana to build 200,000 ?affordable? homes in four years only to end up wasting everybody?s time and the nation?s resources.
?We believe that the NHIS is one of the greatest legacies of the NPP and a precious asset for the nation. An Akufo-Addo government will restore public confidence in the NHIS and allow it to focus on what it was set up to do, which is to give the masses of Ghana access to affordable, quality healthcare,? Dr Prempeh emphasized.
By William Yaw Owusu
