Table of Contents
What is the issue?
- The Ayushman Bharat-National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM) needs a relook, given the implementation concerns with it.
Why AB-NHPM?
- Rising out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE) of the citizens is a key concern in the healthcare sector.
- Among different sources of healthcare financing, 67% of the total health expenditure comes from households’ pockets.
- Health expenses push about 7% of the population below the poverty threshold every year.
- In this backdrop, the government launched the Ayushman Bharat-National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM) to reduce OOPE.
Workable measure?
- The AB-NHPM shares its objectives with the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) scheme.
- The capacity of increased coverage to reduce the actual OOPE is limited in the current form of this scheme.
Concerns
- Coverage
- Private players
- Medical packages list
Ground reality
- India ranks as low as 145th among 195 countries in healthcare quality and accessibility, behind even Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
- The country spends an abysmal 1.3 per cent of its GDP on health, way less than the global average of 6 per cent.
- Over 70 per cent of the total healthcare expenditure is accounted for by the private sector. Given the country’s crumbling public healthcare infrastructure, most patients are forced to go to private clinics and hospitals.
- Health care bills are the single biggest cause of debt in India, with 39 million people being forced into poverty every year.
What is to be done?
- Cooperative federalism
- States’ role
- Increased states’ participation and inflationadjusted rates for procedures could help India progress towards its universal healthcare goal.
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