In last year’s budget, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley promised a health cover of Rs 1 lakh per poor family under the National Health Protection Scheme, which was meant to replace the UPA government’s Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY). However, with the programme yet to see the light of day, the Centre is forced to continue with RSBY, which seems to be losing ground.
An RTI application filed by TOI has revealed that the number of states covered under RSBY has fallen to 15 in 2016-17, the lowest since 2008, when the scheme was launched.
The RTI reply revealed that only 15 states — Karnataka, Kerala, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura — were covered under RSBY in 2016-17. Of these, 10 have non-BJP chief ministers, which indicate that most BJP-ruled states have opted out. The number of enrolled families dropped from 4.13 crore in 2015-16 to 3.63 crore in 2016-17. The number of empanelled private hospitals also came down from 7,865 in 2009-10 to 4,926 in 2016-17.
“All these indicators reflect that RSBY is faltering. The decline in the number of empanelled private hospitals is a big jolt to the scheme,” said Dr Anup Karan, one of the authors of the study, ‘Extending health insurance to the poor in India: An impact evaluation of Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana on out-of-pocket spending for healthcare’.
