Thread by @historykenya101

We seem to be missing the point about NHIF. It's no use saying it should pay all our outpatient bills. It cant. And it wont. The money isnt enough to cover our greed.

***Thread***

NHIF is money that comes from only 2 million Kenyans by force, and a few more conscientious ones. It cannot cover 40 million Kenyans. But that isnt the real problem. The real problem is a neoliberal one.

What is neoliberalism? It's the belief that government should not offer social services like health, and instead, it should pay private sector to do it. Neoliberalism is the evil twin of capitalism, because if capitalists are to be believed, private hospitals should ....

...employ their own staff,offer competitive prices, & pple pay 4 the service OUT OF POCKET like true customers.But neoliberalism is worse. It says that govt should collect taxes for a service,but instead of providing the service, they should pay a private company to provide it.

In other words, in neoliberalism, companies no longer seek customers from the public. Instead, they have one customer. Government. Which means tenders and all the corruption that goes along with that.

But most of all, it means that the poor always subsidize the rich, and the greed of the rich keeps growing because to make money, they just need to talk with government officials behind closed doors. And then public officials will con us by talking of PPPs.

So you see, greed and corruption are inbuilt into the system. Government has abandoned public hospitals, with the express purpose of letting private sectors suck NHIF dry. And I'm not the one imagining that. It's Muigai's paper - People Daily - which reported it 4 years ago.

That means that your contribution to NHIF is supposed to go to tenderpreneurs, and many of them are foreign. As we were preoccupied by BBI and by elections,companies like Abraaj (which owns a stake in Brookside) were soaking up Kenyan hospitals, and countries like Netherlands...

... with the help of the UN, were cashing in on our public hospitals. Check the tweets of UNDP, the UN rep in Kenya and the Dutch rep to the UN for the months of August 2017 to now to see what I'm talking about.

What is wrong with outsourcing healthcare? Simple - a private hospital is at liberty to charge anything it wants.Its goal is profit, not your health.& because it's a private hospital,you can't have govt regulation and democratic oversight like you have for government hospitals.

If a private hospital wants to charge 3k for one panadol tablet, there's nothing you can do to stop it.

Universal healthcare, though, works differently. First, the government's goal in healthcare is healthy people, not profit.

The people who hold govt healthcare accountable are citizens, especially through the ballot (when it works). The people who hold private hospitals accountable are shareholders. And shareholders don't care if people are healthy or if they die. All they care about are dividends.

if the govt is committed to serving people & not business interest,it can negotiate prices with pharmaceuticals to keep cost down.If the P. hospitals are better than private there's no incentive for doctors 2 steal medicine for their clinics,because patients won't go there anyway

So now you get why NHIF is a scam: 1) It can't allow public hospitals to be good because - as Rotich reminded us - private hospitals would then have no business 2) Because NHIF is for private hospitals, those hospitals can charge all the money they want and we can't stop them.

The data during the strike said that of the money NHIF collects per month, 1/5 goes to hospitals abroad, 3/5 to local private hospitals, and only 1/5 to public hospitals! Imagine!

So if you're calling for NHIF to pay all our bills, keep dreaming.

Unless we get good public hospitals and legislation that forces elected officials to attend public hospitals, nothing is going to change. Any health minister or public official promising you that better management can help NHIF pay your hospital bills is just doing Can't happen.