Osinbajo: Why it’s impossible for government alone to fund healthcare

Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo says healthcare funding in Nigeria cannot be handled by only the government.

Osinbajo said this on Thursday at the primary healthcare summit organised by the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA).

The theme of the summit is ‘Re-imagining: Evolving a Resilient Platform for Achieving our National and Global Health Goals in a Peri-COVID Era.’

In his address, the vice-president also spoke on the need to prioritise the primary health system and also encourage private sector intervention.

“In dealing with out-of-pocket expenses, I think we clearly need compulsory health insurance where premiums for certain categories of vulnerable groups are paid by the government,” he said.

“There’s no way that healthcare funding can be paid by the government budget alone. It is simply impossible. The size of the federal government budget itself is so constrained that there is absolutely no way that we can expect to fund healthcare by just budgets.

“So, healthcare insurance is an important pool of resources for funding healthcare on the scale that will be required for a country of 200 million people or more.”

Also speaking at the event, Osagie Ehanire, minister of health, said primary healthcare funding must be expanded to support vulnerable persons.

According to the minister, there is an urgent need to revitalise primary healthcare services “by ensuring their availability at designated communities”, as well as by providing “at least one functional PHC per ward, along with an adequate complement of human resources for health, comprising at the least of nurses, skilled birth attendants and other staff for basic healthcare”.

“Strengthening PHCs not only assures better population health, but reduces the workload on secondary and tertiary healthcare levels and also the catastrophic out-of-pocket patient spending on health,” he added.

“To achieve sustainable development goal targets, PHC funding has to expand to reduce out-of-pocket costs for healthcare to less than 30 percent.”