WE HAVE FREE MEDICARE FOR CHILDREN, AGED, LAGOS INSISTS

The State’s Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mr. Lateef Ibirogba, who made Government’s stand known in reaction to a report in the Vanguard Newspaper of Wednesday, July 17, 2013 titled “No more free medical services to terminally ill patients – Fashola”, described the headline, published on page 10 of the newspaper, as misleading.

That, as he said, is why the government has revolutionized the healthcare system to deepen it to the grassroots level through its provision of the 24-hour flagship Primary Health Centres in the local councils in the State

According to the Commissioner, while the newspaper was free to pick its report’s angle away from the far more significant commissioning of the first dedicated Trauma and Burns Centre in the country, it was wrong to have taken the Governor’s speech out of context by stating that “The State’s free Health care policy could not cover terminal diseases like complicated surgeries, child birth, kidney and cancer among others”.

“It amounts to journalistic illiteracy to describe ‘complicated surgeries’ and ‘Child birth’ as ‘terminal diseases’ as reported by Vanguard’s reporters, the Commissioner said.

However, the commissioner said more fundamentally the report misconstrued the Governor’s emphasis that the State will continue to deepen its strides in the areas of preventable diseases through massive free screening and strong public advocacy while also underscoring the need to embrace Medical Insurance which will enable them to enjoy quality, affordable treatment in case of “Complex surgeries, Kidney and Cancer diseases as well as complicated child birth” which the State’s limited resources would not be able to cope with due to growing population.

Moreover, the Governor further explained that the citizenry would be kept abreast of the modus operandi of such medical insurance policy in due course but this advisory was mischievously taken to the level of concluded state policy by the newspaper

For the avoidance of doubt, the relevant portion of the Governor’s speech is hereby reproduced below:

“We have not finished here. Our work here continues. This is an extension of Lagos University Teaching Hospital. We have tried to balance the pressure on us not only to address infrastructure, to support healthcare but also the welfare of healthcare practitioners. We have not finished our work in all of the departments but we are making progress and the more of the facilities that we put in place the easier it is for healthcare practitioners to actually now stand up and say we want to save lives because we are able to do so.

In some of the places that I have been to, let me say without sounding immodest that very few African countries have the kind of facilities that we have established in the health care sector in Lagos today. And I mean African countries and not talking about cities and I say that matter of factly.

The question then is can we become the regional hub for medical tourism? We now have the facilities and I believe that we have the men and women. So the challenge from today would be how much, how intensive and how passionate our medical practitioners choose to be because hospitals and infrastructure do not treat and they do not care. It is committed and passionate medical practitioners who treat and who care.

Of course, when we finish the question of infrastructure and welfare we will move to perhaps the most defining issue, medical insurance.

Our healthcare policy of free treatment can only go that far and Dr Idris has given some of the reasons why. The rate at which our population is growing is not commensurate with the rate at which our resources are growing so we can provide healthcare, free healthcare for our ante natal care, we can provide for treatment of malaria for certain segments of society but we  cannot provide free healthcare for complex surgeries, Kidney, Cancer, complicated childbirth and this is what I think citizens must sign up and be their own insurer for where the free healthcare stops  to take it on and in a way that is cheap, in a way that is convenient, but we will come back to address you about all of this when our preliminary work is done.”