By the year 2013, Ghana’s National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) might fold up as there may be no more funds to run the scheme, DAILY GUIDE has gathered. “As you can see, year by year, our expenditure keeps escalating, given that more people subscribe to the scheme and the cost of medication has gone up but our revenue is not expanding and we cannot sustain the trend…in 2004 we had just about 1.3 million subscribers but currently we are a little over 17 million and we may have to fold up by 2013 unless something is done about the situation,” a member of the Scheme’s Board of Directors told DAILY GUIDE. Confidential documents sighted by the paper reveal that the scheme’s Board of Directors had met over the issue and forwarded to Cabinet a couple of recommendations on how to sustain the facility, with the most plausible suggestion being to increase the 2.5 percent NHIS levy component of the Value Added Tax (VAT) to 3.5 percent from January 2011. So far, the NHIS is being funded by a token premium of 2.5 percent SSNIT tax, 2.5 percent NHIS levy collected by the VAT office, grants and donor support. In addition, the scheme has investments that support close to 18 percent of its budget. “We need to take a tough decision to sustain the scheme and as we continue to block leaks in the system and let the law deal with those found to have been involved in financial misconduct and our clinical audits have been able to recoup something close to ¢15 billion that would have gone waste. “People seem not to recognize that we have as much as 145 District Mutual Health Insurance Schemes across the country aside our regional offices and administrative cost has also gone up. We are also supporting our stakeholders in the hospitals to ensure they provide quality healthcare to our subscribers…go to Korle-Bu for instance, we have bought them ten lifts so pregnant mothers and patients under emergency conditions would not climb a four-storey building to get healthcare. Such support is happening in other hospitals and all this costs money,” the source noted. The NHIS was established by law in 2004 with a mandate to provide financial risk protection against the cost of basic healthcare for all residents in Ghana who register to join the scheme. Starting from a membership base of 1.3 million in 2004, the scheme currently has a database of over 15 million registered members, representing over 60 percent of the population. Member utilization rates grew exponentially from 9.9 million in 2008 to 17.6 million in 2009, representing a 75% increase. Source: Daily Guide/Ghana