Health insurance cover is very beneficial to citizens who can easily get burdened by current lifestyle diseases, the more reason Kenyans have condemned the NHIF scandal which dared to play with people’s lives in misusing the poor tax payers money.
In a new medical war, Knut now want funds meant for their medical scheme be tripled from the current Sh5.6 billion to Sh17 billion per year.
“It beats logic why over 300,000 teachers on the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) payroll should be allocated only Sh5.6 billion for healthcare while 80,000 police officers are given a whooping Sh5.3 billion for the same,” a report by Knut set to be debated at the 61st annual delegates conference set to start on Wednesday in Nairobi says.
In the report, Knut says all teachers on TSC’s payroll are duly covered under the Minet medical scheme, now in its fourth year.
It says there are 276,707 teachers with dependants, of whom 173,892 are spouses and 500,998 are minors, bringing the grand total to 983,363 of direct beneficiaries of the teachers’ medical scheme.
“At least 90 percent of the teachers have dependants, with the rest being single teachers and those without dependants on the medical scheme. Children constitute over 50 percent of the population that it covered by the scheme,” the report says.
Knut also wants the National Treasury to be wiring the medical funds promptly to TSC for onward transmission to the insurance brokers, to avoid embarrassing scenes where teachers are turned away by healthcare providers because of non-payment of medical fees for services rendered.
Will the government agree to this considering that just yesterday nurses postponed their intended strike to January 2019?
Nurses issued a notice to the Health Cabinet Secretary, governors and the Salaries Remuneration Commission, saying they would down their tools from December 10 until an agreement reached after a five-month strike last year is implemented to the full.
The clinical officers, on the other hand, said they will boycott work in two weeks to push the National Hospital Insurance Fund to recognise their prescription for procedures such as CT scans and X-rays.