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{
    "id": 1094400,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1094400/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 282,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Makueni, WDM-K",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. Daniel Maanzo",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2197,
        "legal_name": "Daniel Kitonga Maanzo",
        "slug": "daniel-kitonga-maanzo"
    },
    "content": "19 pandemic patients are not covered in whatever sense unless somebody has taken a special insurance. I can assure you that Kenyans who are able to take personal insurance, and even those who understand the concept, are very few. Kenyans have to learn the concept of NHIF and that kind of insurance. Many Kenyans in the villages fall ill and end up in hospitals. They find themselves not belonging to any scheme and the only scheme becomes the Member of Parliament. It is real trouble, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic situation. I am thinking of a law that looks like a social fund, to deal with the social aspects whereby Kenyans are able to donate even from the grassroots and pay medical bills. The county governments, which are spearheading devolution, have tried in the area of healthcare. In some counties, each household pays Kshs500 per year but those schemes cannot function effectively simply because the amount of money that people have paid cannot cater for their expectations. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, one of the worst nightmares that we have not covered in this Bill are private hospitals. I have no problem with private hospitals. I have friends who own private hospitals and they have been very helpful. They have saved very many lives when the systems in the public hospitals failed and somebody needed urgent attention, especially after accidents. If one does not have a NHIF cover but his family proves that they can be able to fundraise or can make a deposit to the hospitals, he is assisted. However, when it comes to the scheme, sometimes there are very serious allegations of corruption where funds from these schemes are channelled to individual’s pockets. So, we must first promote Government health facilities so that this money can be paid into a Government facility because it has a system of monitoring the expenditure of the monies. When you channel this money to private hospitals, which we have no problem with and NHIF should recognise them because of saving lives, a lot of these investors who are doctors, instead of building more hospitals with these funds, put them into other businesses and the health system suffers. There should be a way of making sure that money that is contributed socially for the benefit of everyone continues to develop the health sector. We should have a way of ensuring that even private medical practitioners benefiting from this particular fund use the money to develop their health facilities. If the hospital does not have an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), it should use the money it receives from the NHIF to establish one. If the facility does not have specialised machines, the investor should use the funds to procure specialised machines. However, the case now is that when private sector health practitioners get paid by the NHIF, the money ends up in real estate and other investments and we begin losing the original purpose. I am looking at a situation where we amend this law during the Committee of the whole House to capture what the President first thought when he decided to come up with Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and make sure that we have a good precedent and practice, which has worked very well in another country of a similar economic situation to ours, or in countries which have emerged from third world status where this concept has been applied. In the event we do not have such, then we should be the first ones to develop it in Africa so that we have a model which other countries can copy. That way, we can have a healthy nation where people recover from serious ailments by having their hospital bills paid. The tragedy is when somebody is detained in a hospital and the bill cannot be covered by the health insurance scheme. This ends up complicating the matter for that family. The person is detained instead of them being useful. The more they are detained, the more the bills grow and the more the MP has to raise money to make sure that the constituent is discharged from hospital. The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}