Emeka Rollas, president of the Actor’s Guild of Nigeria, has cited the necessity to address the recurrent issue where performers with life-threatening illnesses turn to social media to collect funds for treatment as the reason for the association’s decision to offer health insurance to actors.
Rollas encouraged its members to enrol in their health management programme in an exclusive interview with THE WHISTLER if they didn’t want to fall ill in the future and beg for assistance.
The AGN would not pay these actors’ medical expenditures when they become ill and are unable to pay their bills, according to Rollas, who also underlined that the guild could not force the HMO (health maintenance organisation) on the players who opted to opt out.
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Emeka Rollas said;
“We have Health Management Scheme but then the HMO (health maintenance organization) is not something you enforce on somebody, it’s a scheme you initiate and put up, any member who doesn’t want to get sick and beg money in the future can sign up for the scheme, and where a member doesn’t sign for it, they are on their own when anything happens because our association doesn’t pay for actors.
“It’s not like normal organizations where you receive salary and it’s deducted from it, here we are not the ones that pay our actors.
“So, it’s optional for an actor to sign up to HMO, and whoever that didn’t sign up, whatever comes to you, you have to take care of yourself,”