-The Economic Times New Delhi: The government is planning to rope in domain experts from within and outside the country to ensure a smooth rollout and monitoring of ‘Ayushman Bharat’, its ambitious health insurance scheme for the poor. Niti Aayog, the government’s premier think tank, will come out with guidelines for setting up the project monitoring unit (PMU) for Ayushman Bharat, also known as National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), an official told...

-The Indian Express In the Union Budget 2018-19, an initial corpus of Rs 2,000 crore was provided for the NHPS that aims to provide medical cover of Rs 5 lakh to over 10 crore poor and vulnerable families. New Delhi: TO decide the specifics of the proposed National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), the Centre has decided to call a meeting of state health secretaries shortly. Details of the scheme’s implementation — touted...

-The Hindu Business Line The National Health Protection Scheme is promising but sketchy The National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS), which promises to provide a cover of ?5 lakh each to 10 crore households (50 crore people, or about 40 per cent of the population), marks a big step forward to make secondary and tertiary healthcare affordable to the poor. The initiative is likely to reduce “catastrophic” out-of-pocket expenses, which are estimated to...

-The Indian Express Budget’s bias toward privately-delivered care undermines universal health coverage Until about four decades ago, specialist healthcare (secondary and tertiary care) was largely a province of public hospitals, and the private sector largely kept itself to the provision of generalist healthcare. This underwent a transformation with the rise of the advanced medical interventions comprising tertiary-care medicine like organ transplantation and open heart surgery. Given these highly-profitable medical advances, the private...

-The Hindu The National Health Protection Scheme is disconnected from primary care. It also needs to be scaled up It is unusual for a health programme to become the most prominent feature of a Union Budget. The previous government missed the bus when it failed to implement the recommendations of the High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage (2011). Yet, those recommendations resonate in the Budget of 2018, with commitment to universal...