National Health Protection Scheme has been created to provide health insurance coverage for 10 crore poor and vulnerable families and about 100 crore beneficiaries
"It has been announced that through the new National Health Protection Scheme, 10 crore of the households will receive a Rs 5 lakh coverage per family in a yearly basis for their medical treatments"
Now its been almost two weeks since , Union Finance minister Arun Jaitley announced the new flagship health scheme in Union budget of 2018-19. Most of the critiques, analysts, and media has given it a variety of labels such as being futuristic, supportive of private insurance companies, populist, appropriate solution for universal health care, buffed up version of old schemes, pre-election drama etc.
Last day The National Council of Applied Economic Research said that the actual beneficiaries of the National Health Protection Scheme will be the Deprived Households. Here we have to notice that the Definition of deprived families in the context is those households, whose annual income is below 1.5 lakh. Now taking this definition for the beneficiaries of the scheme, we may find out that about 135 million Indian households will fall in to this category. 135 million household constitutes 56% of the entire households in India. When such a huge part of the population are becoming the beneficiaries of this scheme, and there has never been a report which mentions or highlights the opinions of this people, and that is an interesting point to note.
5-6%
Yes an average deprived household, who have about 1.5 lakh annual income, will only spend about 5 to 6% percent of their income for medical expenses. Now what is the basic reason behind this.? It is so unfortunate, but these household restrain from proper medical treatments, because if they do, it will take10% of their annual income in order to meet the expense. So the majority of the deprived households may not pursue health treatments until they reach worsened conditions or get injured from any particular situations.In order to manage the disease prognosis for these chronic conditions, there is a need of regular outpatient consultations.
Another fact is that, hospitalization is still a far off option for these families. Most of them, or lets say 80% of the time, these people will consult an outpatient clinic. To make things more worse, the National Health Protection Scheme do not cover such outpatient clinics.
So can NHPS really beneficial for deprived households?
The answer cannot be definite. Considering the above facts, National Health Protection Scheme do not have such a greater value for the 135 million deprived households of India. The announced numbers like 10 crore people and 5 lakh per annum coverage, might seem not likely to be delivered in this condition.So looking at the basic level, we should understand that the National Health Protection Scheme is not going to reduce of the cost of health treatments for this 56% of Indian population. It is not gonna bring a huge change in the behavior of these deprived households in the way they seek healthcare. Still 1% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is allocated for expenditure in the Health sector. If the government is planing to double this number in the near future, then there might be a considerable progress in the overall sector.
However or whatever it is, I should say National Health Protection Scheme is a good change. We should not doubt that an insurance coverage of 5 lakh rupees is really going to be helpful for those who requires hospitalization and surgical intervention. But such cases might be lower and far between, and that is the truth.
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