Ayushman Bharat beneficiaries cross 10 mn-mark; PM congratulates nation

In September 2018, PM Modi had launched the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana-Ayushman Bharat

The number of people who have benefited from the ‘Ayushman Bharat’ scheme has crossed the 10 million-mark, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday, noting that the initiative has had a positive impact on several lives.

In September 2018, PM Modi had launched the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana-Ayushman Bharat. It has been termed as the biggest government-sponsored healthcare scheme in the world. “It would make every Indian proud that the number of Ayushman Bharat beneficiaries has crossed 1 crore. In less than two years, this initiative has had a positive impact on so many lives,” the prime minister wrote on Twitter.

He congratulated all the beneficiaries and their families and prayed for their good health. He appreciated the doctors, nurses, healthcare workers and all others associated with Ayushman Bharat, saying their efforts have made it the largest healthcare programme in the world. “This initiative has won the trust of several Indians, especially the poor and downtrodden,” he said. One of the biggest benefits of Ayushman Bharat is portability, the prime minister pointed out.

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Ayushman Bharat working to identify those left out, says CEO Indu Bhushan

In the first year, the momentum has been quite good and we are quite pleased with the way the scheme has rolled out, says Bhushan

About 70 per cent Indians rely on private healthcare for their health needs and bear out of pocket costs, which plunged 55 million people into poverty in 2012. India has earlier tried out national insurance models such as the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) that started in 2008, aiming to cover hospitalisation expenses upto Rs 30,000 for families below the poverty line. Its overall performance was poor and the scheme failed to reduce impoverishment.

In September 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the ambitious Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY), the National Health Protection Scheme, in Ranchi, Jharkhand. The scheme that subsumed RSBY provided an insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh to 100 million ‘poor and vulnerable’ families identified by the socio-economic caste census (SECC) of 2011.

More than a year later, we spoke with Indu Bhushan, the chief executive officer of AB-PMJAY and the National Health Authority (NHA), which is responsible for implementing the scheme. “We have gone beyond RSBY,” said Bhushan, sitting in his seventh floor NHA office on New Delhi’s Janpath. By December 2, 2019, PMJAY has covered over 6.8 million hospitalisations worth Rs 7,160 crore and has issued over 67 million e-cards to beneficiaries, according to PMJAY website and NHA. It is present in all but four states–Odisha, Telangana, West Bengal and New Delhi.

Pointing to the large screen showing the PMJAY dashboard, Bhushan said two-thirds of the hospitalisations were in private hospitals and for tertiary care. “So we are taking care of problems like catastrophic expenditure,” Bhushan said. “We have spent Rs 8,000 crore, but the savings to people is Rs 15,000 crore.”