More Business, Less Care

On Sunday, September 23, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) insurance scheme aka Modicare.

- Sulakshana Nandi

It was billed, with his characteristic grandiloquence, as the ‘world’s largest healthcare pro­gramme’, a reform that will be ‘visible from space’. Fact is the government’s National (Rural) Health Mission, launched in 2013, covers a much larger population than the 107 million fami­ lies or 500 million supposed beneficia­ries of the PMJAY.

For more than a decade, schemes like the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana at the national level, and state schemes in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Karnataka, have been implemented with annual covers ranging from Rs 30,000 to Rs 3 lakh per family. The PMJAY is designed on similar lines. It is necessary to look at the evidence from these schemes, which the govern­ment seems to have ignored.