A member of the National Health Security Office (NHSO) board will file a complaint against the public health minister for negligence of duty regarding the government's emergency healthcare scheme.
Boonyuen Siritham said her legal team is working on the complaints document against the minister. The scheme has been running since April 1,2012 and offers free treatment in emergency cases.
Under the scheme, both state and private hospitals which provide free emergency care to patients have their costs reimbursed by the NHSO.
The NHSO will then collect the money from whichever healthcare scheme the patients are members of whether it is the scheme for state officers supervised by the Comptroller-General's Department (CGD), the 30-baht universal healthcare scheme or the Social Security Fund (SSF).
But Ms Boonyuen said her agency has not been able to collect money from the state official scheme or the SSF since the universal emergency healthcare scheme began.
According to the NHSO, the CGD owes 154.5 million baht and the SSF owes it 18.4 million baht for the emergency treatment scheme.
Between April 1,2012 and March 31 this year, private hospitals nationwide reported 22,453 emergency cases under the scheme.
About half the cases were members of the healthcare scheme for state officials,40% were covered by the universal healthcare scheme and 6.5% by the SSF.The rest were officials from local administrations and state enterprises.
Ms Boonyuen said state officials make up the highest proportion of those taking advantage of the emergency care scheme but the CGD has failed to pay the money due to the NHSO because some regulations need to be changed.
She said Public Health Minister Pradit Sintawanarong, who is the chairman of the NHSO board, has not made sufficient efforts to fix this problem.
"If the problem is not solved soon, the financial burden on the NHSO will become worse," she said.
Source: Bangkok Post May 2, 2013
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