192m Nigerians Have No Health Insurance – AXA Mansard Health CEO

The Chief Executive Officer of AXA Mansard Health Limited, Tope Adeniyi, has said only eight out of 200 million Nigerians have access to health insurance thereby leaving a deficit of 192 million.

This means that since 2003 when the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) was launched, a significant number of Nigerians still access healthcare from their pockets.

AXA Mansard Health is an entity of AXA Mansard in Nigeria. It is a Health Maintenance Organisation (HMO) which operates health insurance through a managed health structure.

Adeniyi, in an interview, said, “The industry, since that time, has grown slowly to cover about eight million people; which is still a wide gap given the country’s population of about 200 million.”

Adoption, he said “has been growing slowly in the private sector, though not as we expected. It still needs to improve because it is important for every economy for the citizens to be healthy as good health is key to productivity.”

He noted that when we compared with other countries of similar economies, Nigeria was still falling behind, and that Ghana had made above 15 per cent adoption and South Africa about 20 per cent.

He, however, noted that, “Nigeria has a huge opportunity to improve health insurance beyond four per cent to almost 70 per cent because there is huge opportunity and potential for the health insurance adoption in Nigeria.