New Delhi: The Congress on Saturday tore apart PM Modi’s claim of bringing the “Ayushman Bharat” scheme as the world’s biggest health insurance scheme to benefit more than 50 crore people as yet another “jumla” (rhetoric) to fool the people. Party spokesman Jairam Ramesh told a Press conference that the reality is the households covered under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY) of the Modi government is lower than the previous Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) and various state health insurance schemes.
Quoting statistics from the National Health Authority, he said PMJAY covers 10.7 crore households as against 11.2 crore households covered under the existing state and central schemes in 2017-18. Ramesh challenged the government to make public the Ayushman Bharat dashboard to public to let the truth about PMJAY come in public domain. He pointed out 2.3 crore households in Maharashtra were covered under the Rajiv Gandhi Jeevandayee Arogya Yojana that was later renamed after Jyotiba Phule, while only a third of the households (84 lakhs) qualified for PMJAY.
In Chhattisgarh, only 37 lakh households were covered by PMJAY as against 40 lakh previously, forcing the state government to dip into own covvers to cover those left out. The Congress leader also underlined the PMJAY does not cover wide range of diseases that afflict millions like diabetes, high blood pressure and backpain. Ramesh said the same kind of huge fraud has been played by Modi with a scheme called “Modicare” to offer Rs5 lakh a year to the families having grave illness. He said another false claim paddled by Modi is poor patients who were earlier left to die since they did not have access to adequate healthcare.
He said the reality is the PMJAY does not cover outpatient treatment, which is 87% of cost paid by the ailing patients. Ramesh cited a 2014 report on how outpatient treatment is a serious financial burden that accounted for 63% of the Rs4,955 spent by a household out if own pocket on health. He said the Modi government’s lack of focus on primary healthcare reflects in its spending priorities — a budget of just Rs1,200 crore in 2018-19 and Rs1,600 crore in 2019-20 to turn 1.5 lakh primary health centres and sub-centres into health and wellness centres.
