President Johhn Mahama
Medical healthcare delivery has constituted critical cornerstones of every government in both developed and developing countries.
As campaign stuff ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections worldwide, and in democratic dispensations especially, politicians have effectively exploited it to their advantage.
It has become a fashion therefore for successive governments in our part of the world to include this critical social intervention policy in both manifestos of political parties and government budgets.
While the foregone is true, the same cannot be said about the sincerity of the inclusion or capture in budgets.
From the Guggisberg days and even under his successor Governor Slater, healthcare has received serious attention. The Government Hospital, which is today the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, which Gordon Guggisberg spearheaded and even dreamt of a Medical School in those early days of colonial administration, the efforts to make medical healthcare accessible remained a serious subject.
The Medical School concept was aborted by Governor Slater, who said at the time that “it was superfluous.” Had Guggisberg continued, perhaps the Gold Coast would have had a Medical School.
Kwame Nkrumah played his part as did others who came after him regarding affordable and accessible medical healthcare delivery.
The most ambitious project in post- independence Ghana was the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) by former President John Agyekum Kufuor, a manifesto actualisation when he became President.
Today, it remains one of the elder statesman’s legacies yet to be surpassed.
President John Dramani Mahama’s promise of making the programme a single payment module did not see the light of day.
Over the years, the National Health Insurance Scheme has endured challenges of funding, the payments made by patrons not enough to cater for the many components of medical healthcare delivery.
Currently, not all ailments and procedures are covered by the scheme. While the situation is true, the country has woken up to a Mahamacare and Free Primary Healthcare programmes, the launch of the latter having been already undertaken in Shai.
Whatever it takes to make healthcare accessible to all Ghanaians is welcome, not however when it is populist-driven. After all, one of the fundamental duties of governments is to provide for the critical needs of citizens, healthcare and shelter being two outstanding ones.
We have observed however that rather than address the funding deficits of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), government or shall we say the President is busy churning out fresh appendages to the existing scheme.
A Mahamacare and its extension, Free Primary Healthcare, are not only superfluous but an exercise in government propaganda intended to win political goodwill.
Such goodwill cannot be achieved when hundreds of Agenda 111 projects strewn across the country are begging for attention and completion.
The craze for nomenclature changes, repackaging for fresh labeling, is disingenuous.
It might be too late or even unacceptable to the President to beat a retreat, suffice it to however point out that such propaganda projects steeped in derision cannot achieve the so-called intended goal of making healthcare accessible to all Ghanaians, especially the vulnerable.