The Federal Government has been advised to tax the telecommunications and aviation sectors to pay for health insurance for the retirees and elderly by the Ministerial Committee for the Provision of the National Health Insurance Scheme for the Retirees and Elderly.
The decision was made by the committee on Tuesday during a news conference in Abuja when it delivered its second presenting report to the Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire.
According to The PUNCH, the committee was established on November 23, 2020, with the goals of evaluating the state of retirees’ and senior citizens’ (those over 60 years old) access to healthcare and developing a national framework for their efficient health insurance coverage.
During the presentation, the head of the Technical Working Group, Jonathan Eke, mentioned that additional potential revenue sources for health insurance for older people during the presentation, including a tax on the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, social health insurance contributions, remittances from the diaspora, and petroleum subsidy reinvestment.
Eke stated that with the passage of the National Health Insurance Act, health funding can be financed utilizing any of the creative financing solutions presented.
He said, “What we have tried to do is innovative financing mechanisms that can be used to reduce excessive dependence on the government to bring this funding. First, we looked at the general revenue which is the basic healthcare provision fund, and from what we have seen, the one per cent has hovered between N50 billion to 55 billion and we split into two, 50 per cent should come to the NHIA, which is about N20 billion and from that, we realised that the funding stream will not be enough to do much to even cover the elderly person.
“Recently, there have been a lot of discussions on sugar-sweetened beverage tax. We have to look at how to earmark that taxation for health to take care of externalities; not just that we want to increase the money in the coffers but we want to use it to pay for the negative impacts that these have in society.
“If we are using about 250 million lines and we realise that if we levy just one kobo per second, we will likely generate up to N272 billion from that if we do two kobo per second, it doubles.”
He continued by saying that several West African nations tax aviation.
In response, Ehanire stated that the inclusion of the elderly in the NHIS is in line with the goal of achieving universal health coverage, which entails leaving no one behind, and that the proposals will be carefully considered and put into practice.
The elderly branch was established in the Gender, Adolescent School Health and Elderly Care Division of the Family Health Department in 2008 to develop policy, guidelines, and action plans for the health and well-being of the elderly, according to the minister, who also mentioned other ministry initiatives to ensure the inclusion of senior citizens.
