Thies, Dec. 8 (APS) – Universal Health Coverage (UHC) must be the subject of a law to ensure its sustainability beyond presidential terms, argued Amadou Kanouté, executive director of CICODEV Africa, Tuesday in Thies.
If we want to make UHC sustainable, it must (…) exceed presidential terms of office,” said Mr. Kanouté, on the sidelines of an awareness-raising session on endogenous health financing mechanisms.
The UHC, as it is today, is the vision of one person, (…) Macky Sall, who campaigned around it, and who, when granted his election, put it in place,” he said.
For him, the challenge is to ensure that it becomes “the UHC for all Senegalese citizens.”
He added: ”there is only one thing that can allow a public policy to be everyone’s business: it is a law passed by the National Assembly”.
The process of drafting such a legal text had resulted in a first “draft law”.
Subsequently, the Head of State requested that the law which was “almost ready to be presented to the National Assembly” be redrafted.
President Sall wanted it to be extended to social protection, one of the key levers of the Plan for an Emerging Senegal (PES), in order to avoid having to pass separate laws for the UHC and the other components of social protection, he explained.
We continue to advocate for there to be a general social orientation law, which could include UHC to make it sustainable,” said the head of CICODEV.
Otherwise, it is quite possible, since we are in a democracy, that another head of state will be elected and say: ‘UHC is not my priority,'” Kanouté argued.
He mentioned, for example, the case of the American President Donald Trump who tried to remove Obamacare, an initiative of Barack Obama allowing a generalization of health coverage.
Kanouté also cited that of Brazilian Joao Bolsanaro, who also tried to remove all the social progress laws that his predecessor Lula had put in place.
Today, the time is ripe, since everyone recognizes that social protection is a fundamental pillar of development, he stressed, it is an investment, it is no longer considered as lost money.
The time has come to make UHC, social protection, social security scholarships sustainable, this is the law that we want,” he insisted.
Source:http://aps.sn/actualites/societe/sante/article/plaidoyer-pour-une-loi-perennisant-la-cmu