By Frank Bray.
Kenya’s healthcare overhaul was sold as our salvation, but it’s turning out to be a disaster. SHA was promised as the cure to a broken system, yet everything happening on the ground screams that the patient is crashing while the government struggles to keep a straight face.
It turns out the government and its people are literally living in different worlds. When the government says something is affordable, it ends up being selective in scope. And ‘accessible healthcare for all’ is proving to fit in that narrative.
Recently, there was a discussion in the Senate about SHA, and senators took to the podium as per the program to say what they had to say. Nairobi Senator Sifuna got his time there, too, and he brought up a sensible argument.
From his statement, senator contributions were revealed to have been raised from less than a thousand shillings to 33,000 kshs in order “to ensure harambees for medical care were a thing of the past.” Yet as Sifuna confidently cited, medical harambees are still a thing.
As Senator Sifuna concluded with ‘SHA is not working,’ voices could be heard echoing in agreement as if “SHA is not working” was a rehearsed musical hook.
I could see Senator Onyonka, seated right behind Sifuna as he spoke, lip-syncing with him as he recalled the promise the head of state had made about SHA. Sifuna cited how the issue of SHA now covering ten percent of costs, or just a portion, was not on the table then.
Some would assume Sifuna’s sentiments were just propaganda, but statements from stakeholders left, right, and centre point to the same thing. A systemic dilemma.
I recently came across news from well-known media outlets with headlines touching on fraudulence, delayed payments, hospital complaints, especially private facilities, and hospital closures.
An interviewee on Crosstalk (Family TV Media KE) says he thinks SHA was supposed to be a revolutionary idea, yet right now as “we” speak it is not what we expected. He thinks SHA is still NHIF baptised under a new name but with the heart of it still unchanged.
And the reports keep coming..
A BusinessDailyAfrica YouTube short shows a 70-year-old cancer patient, Gatama Waigwa. Having spent a fortune and no longer able to continue footing his bills, SHA approved an oncology benefit of 550,000 for him and had only released 400,000 by the time of the interview. He appealed to Health CS Aden Duale to stop being in denial and accept that cancer patients have a real problem with SHA. As per the video description, the man’s crime is “being a cancer patient caught up in the chaotic transition from NHIF to SHA.”
It’s therefore clear that the current regime began to solve the healthcare system by plucking away the fruits of its failure instead of pulling it up by the roots.
Many still feell our leaders must start understanding the roots and fuels of the nation’s problems well before they dive into untested solutions and overhauls. As it stands, SHA should have been piloted to identify hitches before being rolled out.
So what’s obvious now?
Leadership keeps pretending things are okay when they aren’t. And if this continues, we’ll soon be underwater while the captain insists the ship is fine.
