Leadership (Abuja)
Taiwo Ogunmola
25 July 2008
Abuja — Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State yesterday launched the state pilot community-based health insurance scheme, called the Ikosi-Isheri Mutual Health Plan, which he noted signaled the beginning of a new order in the creation of a formalised welfare system for the provision of sustainable healthcare coverage for the citizens of the state.
Fashola explained that the scheme has been specifically designed to provide financial access to healthcare for members of the Olowora, Isheri and Magodo communities, through a prepayment system in which contributions from families in these communities are collected and pooled together into a fund, managed by the community and the fund would the be used to provide healthcare services for members registered under the scheme thereby, ensuring the accessibility of qualitative and affordable health care services to the people.
The governor, who spoke through his Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide Idris, noted that that the institutionalisation of a State Health Insurance Scheme forms not only an integral part of his administration's health sector reform agenda process, to which the state government has renewed its commitment to implement by deploying all resources necessary to actualise, but also marks the delivery of the first phase of his contract with all Lagosians even as he added, builds up the momentum prior to unfolding of the full extent of the Lagos State Managed Care Scheme within the next few months.
"The setting up of this pilot scheme is conceived as a precursor to the wider development of such schemes across the state with the plan to establish at least one mutual health association in each local governments over the next four years. As a state, we have come a long way in the pursuit of reforms in the health sector embarked upon with the objective of improving the performance of the state healthcare delivery system, thus ultimately improving the health status of Lagosians. We are committed to the reform process as we duly recognised the inextricable links between health and development, the pervasive vicious cycle of ill-health and poverty amongst the poorer segments of populations and the potential of health as a key determinant of economic growth and social development", Fashola said.
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