The challenge is to make Universal Health Coverage (UHC) a law to ensure its sustainability so that it becomes the UHC for all Senegalese, said Amadou Kanoute, Executive Director of the Pan-African Institute for Citizenship, Consumers and Development (CICODEV Africa). He was on tour yesterday in Thies.
The Pan-African Institute for Citizenship, Consumers and Development (CICODEV) wants proper coverage for UHC. The Institute calls for a law to sustain the Head of State’s initiative, which was implemented the day after his election at the top of the Supreme Court. This initiative, which offers the most disadvantaged groups the chance to benefit from health insurance coverage, must “be the subject of a law, in order to ensure its sustainability beyond presidential terms,” says Amadou Kanouté.
The executive director of CICODEV Africa spoke in Thies, on the sidelines of a community conversation that was preceded by field visits within the region, to sensitize organized groups on the need to increase the enrollment rate of citizens into mutual health organizations for access to health care. Mr. Kanouté remains convinced that “if we want to ensure the UHC’s sustainability, it must be trans-mandatory. It has to go beyond presidential terms.” He notes in this chapter: “UHC, as it is today, is the vision of one person, Macky Sall, who campaigned around it, and who, when God granted his election, put it in place. It is his UHC. Now, what we need to do is to make it the UHC for all Senegalese citizens.” Because in the eyes of the head of CICODEV, “there is only one thing that can allow public policy to be everyone’s business: it is a law passed in the National Assembly.” And for him, the process of such a law hasn’t been initiated “until we have a first draft of the law. Subsequently, he continued, “since one of the key levers of the Plan for an Emerging Senegal (PES) is social protection, the Head of State asked, instead of a law on UHC and other aspects of social protection, to take over this law which was in gestation and was almost ready to be presented to the National Assembly, to expand it to have a law on social protection. So we continue to advocate for a general social orientation law that could include UHC in order to make it sustainable. Otherwise, it is quite possible, since we are in a democracy, that another head of state will be elected and will say: ”UHC is not my priority, purely for political reasons,” explained Amadou Kanouté, who gave the example of the United States where the American President Donald Trump, upon coming into power, “tried to remove Obama care”, a law that generalized health coverage, at the initiative of his predecessor Barack Obama. The head of CICODEV also cites the case of Brazilian President Joao Bolsonaro who, once installed at the head of Brazil, also tried “to remove all the laws of social progress put in place by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva”.
“Today, the time is ripe, since everyone recognizes that social protection is a fundamental pillar of development. It is an investment, it is no longer considered as lost money. The time has come to make the UHC, social protection and social security scholarships sustainable. This is the law we want,” says the executive director of CICODEV.