The government has increased its spending on medical bills for civil servants and disciplined forces, allowing beneficiaries to visit hospitals without incurring out of pocket costs.
Public Service minister Dalmas Otieno said that the old medical allowances to civil servants and disciplined forces only account for 50 per cent of the Sh4.3 billion scheme that the government rolled out at the beginning of this month.
Under the new scheme to be administered by the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF), each of the more than 220,000 staff, spouse and three children will benefit from state-funded medical services as well as life insurance cover.
“They will only need to produce NHIF cards plus identity that distinguishes them as government employees or their dependants in order to access treatment at any health facility in the country,” said the Public Service minister.
The government is expected to disburse the money to NHIF to cater for medical services at selected health facilities. The fund will remit the life insurance premium to participating private insurance firms.
The scheme guarantees outpatient coverage of up to Sh150,000, inpatient expenditure level of up to Sh2 million and dental cover of Sh30,000 per year.
For group life insurance, civil servants and members of the disciplined forces are now covered for sum assured of up to Sh500,000. Civil servants will be restricted on the facilities they can seek treatment from depending on their rank,” said Public Service PS Titus Ndambuki.
The scheme is expected to bring relief to civil servants and members of the disciplined services who are locked out of most medical institutions by high bills that they could hardly they could meet their own resources.
Mr Otieno said they settled on NHIF — as opposed to private insurance companies — to avoid stringent requirements such as excluding chronically ill patients from the scheme.
All the beneficiaries would, however, have to undergo compulsory medical screening on annual basis to ensure preventable diseases are detected on time.
“Our inspectors will also visit and review charges at local health facilities regularly to ensure we don’t end up incurring unnecessary costs,” said assistant minister Aden Sugow.
The Fund is expected to make provisions for employees who wish to cover additional dependants to pay extra premium at fair rates, the officials said.
The announcement comes just days after Union of Kenya Civil Servants gave a notice of a plan to go on strike later this month over failure by government to implement a collective bargaining agreement signed four years ago.
Among the issues cited as ground for the pending strike include the medical insurance scheme, failure to review house allowance and the continued hiring of workers on contract.
