NHIA biometric registration is waste of tax payers' money - PPP

The Progressive People’s Party says the planned biometric registration by the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), is a waste of the country's scarce resources.

According to the PPP, which is led by Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, the biometric registration exercise amounts to a duplication and by extension a waste of the tax payers’ money.

The NHIA announced this week, its intention to embark on a pilot biometric registration exercise which would be followed by a nation-wide scale-up of the exercise. According to the NHIA, the key objective for implementing the biometric solution is to prevent duplicate records and to implement an effective verification (authentication) system at the point of healthcare service delivery.

“It demonstrates lack of coordination in public policy decision-making and causing financial loss to the State,” the PPP stated in a release on Tuesday.

The basis for this position of the PPP is that, the State had already invested millions of dollars to have all Ghanaians aged six and above, biometrically registered under the National Identification System.

The Party said: “The NIA project is not only to establish a National Register which will serve as a single source of credible population related data for national development, but it is to provide a key transformational platform for integrating and redefining public and private sector service delivery approaches. It was to create a central database of all Ghanaians with unique National Identification Numbers for the easy and effective identification in the utilization of public services”.

The PPP believes that, in the interest of effective coordination and judicious use of scarce resources, the NHIS must take full advantage of the database of the NIA to achieve the same objective of properly identifying subscribers of the insurance scheme.

“There is no need to spend additional resources to generate information which already exist with the NIA. The NIA project was to establish a primary database that allows other institutions of State such as the Electoral Commission, Driver & Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), the Police Service, Immigration Service, Passport Office, SSNIT, Birth & Death Registry and Commercial Banks to utilize for the purposes of identification”.

The statement appealed to President John Mahama not to allow the NHIA to implement the planned biometric registration project which it described as waste of resources.

“We humbly appeal to the good offices of the Chairman and Members of the Board of Directors of the NHIA to intervene to halt this biometric registration and collaborate with the NIA for the same information the NHIS seeks to collate. We should all join forces to appeal to the government to let the NIA make the identification exercise see the light of day”.