Abuja — The Federal Government has restated its commitment to providing affordable and qualitative health care delivery for all by using part of the debt relief gains to fund the National Health Care Insurance Scheme (NHIS).

According to President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, a holistic approach to reducing maternal and related child health mortality statistics should be vigorously pursued.

The president, who was represented by the acting Minister of Health, Dr. Hassan Muhammad Lawal Dogo Waziri, explained that the concept to use part of the debt relief gains to provide access to care for the vulnerable groups came about one and a half year ago when funds were made available by the Dutch government for community health insurance project in selected communities of Lagos and Kwara States.

"Following this, the NHIS developed a position paper on how to give cover to these selected groups. This went through various stages of development which finally matured into the NHIS-MDG MCH project", said he.

According to Dogo Waziri, the project seeks to accelerate the achievement of two of the three health-specific Millennium Development Goals thus addressing the critical problem of acces to qualitative healthcare services for pregnant women and children under 5 in the country.

The NHIS scribe said that the NHIS had been reaching out to developmental agencies government and non-governmental in it's quest to achieve it's mandate of universal coverage by 2015.