Voluntary contributions to the National Hospital Insurance Fund have fallen by 77 per cent since Covid-19 pandemic was reported in March.
Only 23 per cent of Kenyans who were voluntarily paying the monthly Sh500 in January are still doing so, fund CEO Peter Kamunyo told the Star.
Most of the contributors are self-employed in small businesses which may have collapsed or lost sales to due to Covid-19-related lockdowns locally and abroad.
"This is by end of June. Mandatory contributions from the formal sector have also reduced slightly," he said.
The fund has 8.5 million registered members with only five million still paying their premiums.
Default rate in the voluntary Sh500 per month contributions category was already high before Covid-19 was reported. Only 35 per cent of registered members consistently paid their premiums.
The scheme is unsustainable because the NHIF spends three times more money paying for treatment of Kenyans in that category.
Kamunyo spoke at the NHIF head office in Nairobi after signing an agreement with Kisumu County Deputy Governor Mathews Owili.
The county will pay Sh22.5 million monthly insurance premiums for 45,000 households as per the agreement.
"These are people who cannot afford to pay for insurance. We felt they needed to be supported so that they can access health services," Owili said.
"Every household has about four members, so that is about 200,000 people already."
The Kisumu programme is the biggest such initiative by a county government. The county intends to increase the number to 90,000 families by year end.
"We will be supporting at total of 500,000 people to access health services," the DG said.
Kisumu was one of the four pilot counties for the Universal Health Coverage in December 2018-2019, within which period residents did not pay for NHIF but accessed free services.
That programme was terminated in January. Residents are now required to pay premiums for NHIF to pay for their treatment.
Nyeri, Isiolo and Machakos also took part in the UHC pilot.
The UHC was expected to be launched this year, before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
An experts panel appointed by former Health Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki had proposed that the state should allocate Sh50 billion to NHIF to cover premiums for about 30 million Kenyans for UHC every year.
Currently, only about 25 million are covered by the national health insurer.
The panel, which was headed by former insurer James Wambugu, also proposed NHIF collapses all its 74 different schemes into three - employer-paid scheme, civil servants scheme and the tax-based scheme for the poor and Kenyans in informal jobs.
The current 74 active schemes include the Sh500 voluntary scheme, 39 different parastatal schemes, 11 private companies, and 16 county governments, civil servants’ scheme.
The others are Edu Afya, Linda Mama, HISP, National Police and Kenya Prison medical scheme, and older persons and severely disabled scheme.
- mwaniki fm
