NAIROBI Kenya, Oct 1- Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah has filled a petition to stop the Ministry of Health from rolling out of Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF) citing concerns over the lack of legislation to operationalize the fund.
Omtatah together with Eliud Matindi and Magare Gikenyi in their petition under a Certificate of Urgency, claim the subsidiary legislation to operationalize the Social Health Insurance Act is not in place, seeking court orders to render the implementation of the SHIF unconstitutional.
They are also seeking orders to suspend, and later quash, the decision by the government to contract Safaricom to provide the Integrated Healthcare Information Technology System for Universal Health Care (UHC).
“The petitioners have attached to their petition highly classified documents which expose the entire fraud scheme between corrupt government operatives and highly connected wheeler dealers in the Safaricom Consortium,” he said.
“The secretive documents expose the contract between the Government of Kenya and the Safaricom Consortium to be a vicious fraud scheme deliberately designed to steal colossal amounts of money from the SHIF and/or from the Consolidated Fund, in the event contributions to the fund fail to raise the contract billions.”
Parliament’s Health Committee cleared the scheme on Monday, stating that its queries regarding the multi-billion health digitization project had been addressed.
This is after uncertainty emerged over its rollout following gaps in the Means Testing Instrument (MTI) which determines the annual premium contribution for informal sector households.
The National Assembly Health Committee raised issues with the accuracy of the MTI system following revelations that a total sample size of 2000 Kenyans in the informal sector were subjected to the test across the eight counties.
“We conducted the Means Testing Instrument in eight counties and the data that we have is accurate and we assure you we will not have the same issues we are facing in the education sector,” acting chairman Social Health Authority Abdi Mohammed.
Health Cabinet Secretary Deborah Barasa defended the system under the new national insurance fund saying they are tamper proof and will ultimately address issues that have faced access to affordable health care.
The MTI pilot project was conducted in Turkana, Tana River, Narok, Migori, Bungoma, Bomet, Kiambu and Nairobi which has so far encompassed 17 variables to determine the lowest and highest contribution in the informal sector households.
Source: capitalfm
