The government indebtedness to the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) has reduced the Trust investment earnings and jeopardize its already doubtful ability to pay future pensions.
This is a revelation by a World Bank study titled “Social Protection Programme Spending and Household Welfare in Ghana”.
The report revealed that the government failed to pay more than GH¢3 billion it owed to SSNIT for its employees’ premia over the previous decade.
“An important observation from many operational reviews and the press is that the government has a pervasive and chronic problem: It often accumulates substantial arrears to its service providers. Over the previous decade, the government failed to pay more than GH¢3 billion it owed to SSNIT for its employees’ premia”.
The report also pointed out that the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) is so slow to reimburse health care providers that many now refuse to accept NHIS patients or charge them illegal copays.
The report also explained that SSNIT is also far from universal, highlighting that “In the past few years, it has tried to draw in more informal sector workers, but the response has been minimal’.
“Also, there is a lesson from the NHIS experience: The government probably cannot and will not fund a universal pension, so any expansion of membership will require actuarially fair premia payments from new members, something that will probably keep them from joining”, it added.
NHIS Presents Most Daunting Problems
The report continued that the NHIS presents the most daunting problems found in this study.
Unlike the other social protection programs, it stated that the NHIS is meant to be universal that is, to provide health insurance for all. Yet over the past 15 years, enrollment has been 30% to 40% of the population, but even with this reduced population coverage, NHIS has difficulty covering its expenses. “By far the most common criticism we found of any social protection program in Ghana is that NHIS pays health care providers late or not at all for the services they provide to NHIS members.
The report concluded that if NHIS is to be truly universal, it will need substantially more resources, more than twice its current outlay.
The authors of the report were Christabel Dadzie, Dhushyanth Raju and Stephen D. Younger.