Include parents in medical insurance, MPs advise

During scrutiny of a draft law on health insurance schemes on, MPs in the lower chamber’s standing committee on national unity, rights and fight against Genocide, Thursday insisted that apart from a beneficiary’s spouse and children, parents must also be beneficiaries in the schemes.Ministry of Health (MoH) and Rwanda Social Security Board (RSSB) officials told MPs that adding a parent, or parents, of a beneficiary would cause losses and implementation difficulties, but lawmakers objected, insisting they had no empirical evidence to back up their claims.MPs resolved that Article 9 of the draft law should state that beneficiaries of a person insured for a public health insurance scheme are: a legally married spouse; a child recognised by civil law; a handicapped dependent not able to earn an income, as well as a parent.MPs reminded MoH legal officer, Christine Ukize, Dr. Innocent Gakwaya, of the RSSB, and others, that even when the Health Minister initially presented the bill during a plenary session last year, Rwandans were told that parents will benefit from public health insurance schemes.Dr. Gakwaya noted that a reliable study conducted by experts, presented several cases of people that can be considered as parents, given the Rwandan context and definition of Umubyeyi, or parent.“We realised that an insured person whose insurance would have covered about three or four people, his wife and their two children, will now cover nearly ten people.” Dr. Gakwaya said:“There are still problems, and that is why I also support the idea that things should first be ironed out”.The concern is that the notion of a parent in the Rwandan cultural context is “elastic” and often includes people like a mother, a father in law, and other elderly people under a person’s care.Ukize also backed Dr. Gakwaya.“Like Dr. Gakwaya noted, you note that the notion of a parent, in Rwanda, is complicated. There is even another problem that came up; if a person has many children, who will take charge of their insurance? Which of the children will take charge of this parent?”When the minister and top health officials tabled the bill last year, they received a round of applause from MPs when they told the plenary that parents would be included. The sudden change has irked lawmakers, especially as it was not backed by concrete research-based evidence. Françoise Mukayisenga, the Deputy Chairperson of the committee, said: “When we were examining this article, in the beginning, it was insurance companies that had a problem as they told us that money and other things would increase.“And even the representative of RSSB has now told us that there would be problems on money and rise in premiums. But as lawmakers, we want them to carry out a real study and find out what exact percentage it would be if one was to provide medical insurance for their parents,” she said.

National

Include parents in medical insurance, MPs advise