AB: A demonstration of will to make universal healthcare work in India | Antony Jacob

The healthcare and health insurance sector in India received a much-needed shot in the arm during this year’s Union Budget. The government’s plan of covering hospitalisation expenses for around 500 million poor citizens under the Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Scheme is a significant step towards universal healthcare. Its sheer magnitude is huge. Since the government has also announced to launch the scheme on September 25, work is being expedited in the country to ensure it becomes a reality. This needs to be carefully managed, and more importantly, the selection of right health insurance providers is a critical function to the overall success of the programme.

Given the healthcare sector is one of the largest job providers in India, the scheme will offer opportunity for development and empowering the weaker sections of the society in more ways than one. When implemented, it will not only build new healthcare facilities in every districts and villages but will also potentially create lakhs of new jobs. It will be a game changer in empowering India’s poor and underprivileged. It has the potential to become the cornerstone of India’s healthcare needs.

Also, the need of healthcare infrastructure for the new scheme will be of a huge scale. To raise a new army of medical professionals and hospitals, imagine the number of medical colleges, paramedical schools that would have to be built and the jobs that it would in turn generate. That is just at the back end. When it comes to the front end or the actual healthcare
delivery, it is estimated that every additional hospital bed creates five direct and 25 indirect employment opportunities. Thus, under this programme millions of new jobs can be created.

A further critical catalyst in establishing foundation for future collaborations and enhancing partnership from private sector is the PPP model. Nowhere in the world does a model exist where the public sector finances the entire country’s healthcare expenses. While the primary responsibility lies with the government, private players offer the benefits of innovation and efficiency. For instance, the private sector accounts for nearly 40 per cent of the overall available hospital beds but caters to 80 per cent of patients in both urban and rural areas. This simple statistics highlights the pressing need for PPP models to increase access and enhance the utilisation of unused government healthcare capacity. In this context, AB-NHPS is uniquely positioned to expand the scope, making it a true universal, end-to-end healthcare scheme.

Overall, the implementation of NHPS is a major undertaking, something that is unprecedented in India, and taking place over a large scale. In my view, the initial years will provide valuable learnings and insights that will help scale up the scheme. Having said that, the scheme definitely has much potential tobring India another step closer to being a truly health confident nation.

Next article – It has the potential to spur major growth in the insurance sector | Dr Usha Manjunath