(FE)
Hospitalisation under the recently-launched Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) will be 1 lakh/day as the scheme stabilises and the annual cost will double to over Rs 20,000 crore, Ayushman Bharat CEO Indu Bhushan said on Friday. After the PM-JAY launch on September 23, about 20,000 people have taken free-of-cost hospitalisation benefit, most of whom are from Chhattisgarh.
The average hospitalisation is about 4,000 per day after the scheme was rolled out on September 23. Bhushan said about 25 lakh could benefit from free hospitalisation by the end of March 2019.
Hospitalisation rate would further rise to 1 lakh/day when beneficiaries from under-served states Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, which account for one-third of India’s population, fully access the scheme.
Speaking at Indian Express Group’s Idea Exchange programme, Bhushan said: “I am very sure that there will be explosion of demand (for the scheme)”. He noted that the NSSO data indicated an inverse correlation between health and the proportion of people who are ailing. “For instance, the healthy states where infant mortality rate is very low and all the health indicators are good, proportion of people who claim to be sick are high. This is obviously because people are more aware and are indeed reporting sickness. Conversely, in states where infant mortality is high you will find report of sickness low,” he said. The official expects PM-JAY would trigger the latent demand for sickness reporting and hospitalisation.
