The West Akim District Chief Executive, Kwabena Sintim-Aboagye has pleaded with service providers of the National Health Insurance Scheme to show understanding and be patient with the scheme whenever there was a delay in the payment of medical bills.

He said refusing to attend to registered members of the scheme because of default in payments might lead to loss of confidence in the scheme and that could undermine the government's efforts at making quality health care available to every Ghanaian.

Mr Sintim-Aboagye was speaking at a meeting of the district assembly at Asamankese and gave the assurance of the readiness of the assembly to continue to assist the scheme to meet its registration targets and also become more and more responsive to the needs of the people

He said a recent audit report into the activities of the scheme revealed some corrupt practices that impeded its growth and development and informed the assembly that the affected officers had been interdicted while the police were investigating other issues arising out of the audit report.

He said as at the end of March 2007, the total registered membership of the West Akyem District Mutual Health Insurance Scheme stood at 60,000, representing 35 percent of the district's population.

Mr Sintim-Aboagye said the scheme had collected a total premium of over 1.4 billion cedis while total bills paid to service providers since June 1, 2005, amounted to over 4.1 billion cedis.

The outstanding balance of bills to be paid stood at 1.9 billion cedis.

He said 1,121,000,000 cedis, representing 60 percent of the outstanding balance of bills, had been received from the Health Insurance Council for payment to service providers.

The total number of identity cards issued to registered members was 56,865.

Source: GNA