A leading member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Dr. Arthur Kennedy has stated that Ghana does not have a healthcare system but rather an 'illness care system'. Dr. Kennedy who was speaking on Joy FM's Super Morning Show Tuesday said the country’s healthcare system is deficient in many aspects and needs to be critically examined as soon as possible. He said many healthcare facilities in the country were outdated, adding “actually, about two-thirds of our hospitals that stand now were built before 1960 and a lot of them were actually built as clinics and later upgraded to hospitals in name only.” One debilitating problem confronting health delivery, he pointed out that is inadequate health professionals. Dr. Kennedy maintained that even though Health Insurance is very important in financing healthcare, Ghana’s health insurance was poorly structured. “I think that we got our insurance system wrong. The National Health Insurance Scheme is a very, very good idea but one, it was structured improperly, it should be revamped significantly and secondly, we should augment the [scheme],” he advised. Dr. Kennedy who is also a medical doctor said in evaluating a healthcare system, it is vital to look at three parameters; cost, financing, quality of health service. He insisted that it was wrong for people to always point to the difficulty in financing as the bane to quality healthcare delivery. "The American healthcare system is funded far more than any other healthcare system and yet 45 million Americans are uninsured compared to, for example, Canada which has less funding but covers more probably at a higher quality. so we should not blame financing for all our problems,” he noted To him poor leadership has also robbed the country of policies that could help bring some sanity in the sector, stressing the country needs action-oriented leaders to make an impact on the health sector: “we need leaders who are ready to hit the ground running from day one.” He said the Ghana Health Service as a body is too bureaucratic which he said is the major reason why the healthcare sector is not receiving the needed support it requires. “This is an over bureaucratized system that is unresponsive to the needs [of the sector].” Dr. Kennedy suggested the restructuring of the health sector to make it easier for Ghanaians abroad to come and work permanently or part time.