Ten days before he launches the big-ticket healthcare scheme, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is taking stock of the preparations.
PM Modi, who will announce the Ayushman Bharat scheme on August 15, was briefed by officials from the ministry of health and family welfare, NITI Aayog and PMO, on Saturday. The officials updated the PM about various aspects of the scheme, including preparations in states and development of the technological infrastructure associated with the scheme, according to the PMO.
The scheme, Ayushman Bharat-National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM), will provide “health assurance” cover of upto Rs. 5 lakh per family. It will cover over 10 crore poor and vulnerable families.
Coming at a crucial time before the 2019 elections, AB-NHPM is being closely monitored by the PMO. PM Modi is pitching it not just as an insurance scheme that provides financial cover for tertiary care, but as an “assurance” scheme that goes much beyond. “Assurance is different from insurance in that it includes other social determinants of health. It includes factors such as good infrastructure, community participation, sanitation and nutrition too,” said a health expert who did not wish to be named. “The government, however, is using the term in a narrow way. Their ‘assurance’ is that poor people don’t have to pay premium; the government pays for them, and they get some health cover,” the expert said.
The Centre’s plan is to cover preventive and primary healthcare too, by upgrading 1.5 lakh sub-centres in the country, and transform them into health and wellness centres. A sub-centre is the first point of care in a village, currently manned by a auxilary nurse midwife (ANM), and offers immunisation and antenatal care services. Under AB-NHPM, the plan is to upgrade these by appointing a team of healthcare professionals headed by an AYUSH doctor, and expanding the range of services.
In April, the Prime Minister had also inaugurated the first ‘Health and Wellness Centre’ in Bijapur district in Chhattisgarh.
As of now though, the focus is on the insurance scheme, and the ministry of health and family welfare is racing against time to get everything ready for the launch, including getting the states to sign an agreement with the Centre.
On Thursday, Rajasthan became the 27th state to sign it. For the Centre, it’s a shot in the arm because of media reports about the state's “unwillingness” to join the scheme. Despite it being a BJP-ruled state, there were concerns in Rajasthan around merging the Centre's scheme with the state’s existing health insurance programme.
However, the ministry of health and family welfare had contended that both Rajasthan and Maharashtra were “willing”, and would sign the agreement soon. The existing state insurance schemes were covering a larger pool of beneficiaries than the Centre's scheme would, and hence, were only taking time to “review the financial and operational implications” of this convergence, it had said.