Modicare Moves Up A Gear

WHEN AYUSH MANBHARAT, the national health protection scheme, was launched last September sceptics said it wouldn’t work. Nearly five months later, they might have to eat their words.

- Minhaz Merchant

Providing universal healthcare in a poor country like India is fiendishly difficult. Even the United States, with a per capita income many multiples of India’s, has wrestled with the problem for decades. Obamacare is close to collapse and President Donald Trump’s alternative health insurance proposals face mounting criticism.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates knows India’s healthcare challenges first-hand. The Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation has done path-breaking work in improving rural healthcare. His tweet commending Modicare therefore deserves attention. Gates posted this on January 17, 2019: “Congratulations to the Indian government on the first 100 days of @ Ayushman NHA. It’s great to see how many people have been reached by the programme so far.”

With an estimated one million poor Indians likely to benefit from free hospital care in the first five months of the scheme, Ayushman Bharat has exceeded most expectations. Over Rs 1,200 crore has so far been pre-authorised for a multitude of specialised medical procedures, including angioplasty, valve replacements, cancer surgery and orthopaedic treatment. The scheme covers 100.70 million poor households and, at an average of five members per household, over 500 million Indians.

The number of patients being admitted to hospitals under Modicare, as the scheme has come to be known, quadrupled from around 3,000 per day in October 2018 to over 12,000 per day in January 2019. The growth rate in hospital admissions is currently trending at nearly 50 per cent per month. More than 16,000 hospitals have been empanelled under Ayushman Bharat. Of these nearly 70 per cent are multi-speciality hospitals.