Ayushman Bharat Trivialises India's Quest for Universal Health Care -Jean Dreze

-TheWire.in

Little can be done without a massive increase in public health expenditure and a radical revamp of the primary health infrastructure.

Even by Narendra Modi’s high standards, the level of deception involved in the recent launch of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) is breath-taking: the prime minister managed to claim that PMJAY is the world’s largest health programme without making any significant financial provision for it.

It may be recalled that PMJAY is one of the two components of Ayushman Bharat, the Modi government’s flagship health initiative. The other component is the creation of 1,50,000 “health and wellness centres”. The finance minister allocated Rs 1,200 crore for these centres in 2018-19. That comes to Rs 80,000 per centre. Essentially, it is just a new coat of paint for the old primary health centres, which are being renamed for the occasion.

The budget allocation for PMJAY in 2018-19 is just Rs 2,000 crore. That is not much more than the previous year’s budget allocation of Rs 1,000 crore for Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, PMJAY’s predecessor, which is now being subsumed under PMJAY. In other words, there is virtually no new money this year for PMJAY.

The government claims that PMJAY will provide a health insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh to 10 crore families (about 50 crore persons). What would it actually take to provide this sort of insurance cover? If the beneficiaries spend just one per cent of their Rs 5 lakh quota in a year, on average, then the annual expenditure will come to Rs 50,000 crore. This a very conservative estimate – if the scheme makes it reasonably easy for people to claim their insurance money, the actual cost could easily be twice as much, or more. There is absolutely no indication that the government is willing to spend that sort of money on PMJAY.

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