The Union Cabinet on Wednesday cleared the National Health Protection Mission under which the central government promised to provide an insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh to 10.74 crore poor and deprived families.
However, a press note issued by the government after the Cabinet meeting didn’t say how much would be the central government’s allocation for the scheme dubbed as Modi Care by the ruling BJP-led dispensation and when will it be launched.
The Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission will subsume the on-going centrally sponsored schemes -Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana and the Senior Citizen Health Insurance Scheme.
The insurance cover will take care of almost all secondary care and most of tertiary care procedures. There will be no cap on family size and age in the scheme and the benefit cover will include pre and post-hospitalisation expenses as well.
All pre-existing conditions will be covered from day one of the policy, according to the statement. For the beneficiaries, it would be cashless treatment.
The payments will be done on package rate, which has to be defined by the government in advance. The package will include all the costs associated with treatment. The States and Union Territories will have the liberty to modify these rates within a limited bandwidth.
Once implemented, the ambitious scheme is expected to lower the out of pocket expenditure on healthcare for people as in-patient hospitalisation cost rose by nearly 300% in India in the last 10 years. (DH)
