Ayushman Bharat, Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) #32

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Syllabus: Mains paper 2 | Healthcare, Government policies

'Universal health coverage is still a distant dream'. Discuss in the light of recently announced Ayushman Bharat scheme.

Why in news?

  • The Ayushman Bharat—Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY), a health insurance scheme announced in the last budget, will be launched on 23 September.
  • It is arguably the most ambitious social health insurance (SHI) programme ever launched anywhere in the world.
  • PMJAY will provide insurance up to ₹500,000 per family per year for in-patient secondary and tertiary treatment.
  • It will cover over 100 million vulnerable families, which is about 500 million people, the poorest 40% of India’s population.
  • Treatment would be provided by empanelled public and private hospitals.

About PMJAY

  • PMJAY is actually the second tier of Ayushman Bharat, a two-tier scheme. It will ride on the first tier, a network of 150,000 health and wellness centres (HWCs) that will provide free universal and comprehensive primary health care.
  • The HWCs will serve as the awareness, screening and referral link between patients and PMJAY.
  • A cadre of frontline health service professionals called Pradhan Mantri Aarogya Mitras (PMAMs) is being trained to facilitate the provision of treatment to beneficiaries at hospitals.

Relevance of PMJAY

  • The significance of PMJAY has to be seen in the context of existing health conditions and health service delivery systems in India.
  • With an average life expectancy of 68.3 years, India trails all its Asian neighbours barring Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar and Laos.

Healthcare expenditure not satisfactory

  • Healthcare is one important factor among several that determine health outcomes along with income, nutrition, and hygiene.
  • The World Health Organization recommends that a country should spend at least 4% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health.
  • India’s health expenditure at 3.9% of GDP is comparable to this norm.
  • However, the health ministry’s National Health Accounts show that total government health expenditure is only an appalling 1.1% of GDP.
  • Well over 70% of health expenditure is privately financed.
  • More than 62% is direct out of pocket (OOP) spending by patients as against the WHO-recommended OOP ceiling of 40%.

Less focus on preventive care

  • Preventive health spending is more equitable and much more cost effective in improving health standards.
  • But less than a quarter of India’s meagre public health expenditure is allocated to preventive care.
  • There is thus the continuing high incidence of communicable diseases.
  • There is a rising incidence of non-communicable diseases with income growth, lifestyle changes and environmental degradation, resulting in a rising total burden of disease.

Challenges to PMJAY

Unknown financial cost of the programme

  1. No actuarial database is available to yield a probability distribution of the expected number of different health episodes requiring different treatments at varying costs.
  2. Without such a database, insurance agencies cannot estimate the required premium to adequately cover the pooled risk —the ultimate cost of the programme.

Coverage erosion

  1. A pattern observed in several countries is that when costs escalate, the package covered by SHI is shrunk and co-payments and coverage caps are introduced, thereby raising the burden of OOP spending.
  2. Some private providers might be pushing high-cost treatments not covered by SHI to enhance their profit margins, thereby further raising the OOP burden on patients.

Implementation failure

  1. PMJAY will ride on the first tier of Ayushman Bharat, a network of 150,000 HWCs spread throughout the country.
  2. Fixing this weak primary care foundation of India’s public healthcare system is more urgently needed than providing insurance for secondary and tertiary care.

What is the way forward?

  • These challenges do not imply that PMJAY will fail but that it is only a first step on the road to universal SHI.
  • As a follower country, India can learn from the experiences of others.
  • The Thai model with excellent SHI coverage and OOP spending down to 18% is increasingly seen as the global best practice.

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Hemant Bhatt
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