Healthcare is an indispensable factor for any country’s well-being across the globe. As our lifestyle is exposed to stress and pollution, the dangers to health and wellness need to be dealt in a way benefitting those families who are not insured for healthcare. Else, the healthcare expenses are catastrophic for the poor families.

CII-Western Region’s core group on healthcare organized a session with Dr Vinod Paul, member NITI Ayog, on National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS-Ayushman Bharat), WeSchool, Mumbai campus. The session elaborated on the key motto of the scheme and the phase-wise implementation. The event was attended by representatives of CII, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and diagnostic companies, nursing centres, service providers, and WeSchool faculty and students.

What is National Health Mission Protection?

It is a scheme which aims to provide insurance coverage of up to Rs.5 lakh per year for poor families. It aims to cover more than 10 crore under-privileged families in India. There is no need to enrol in this scheme as the government is using census data to identify the poor families. Those in this list will be entitled to the benefits under the scheme.

The overall focus of NHPS is to strengthen the primary healthcare in India and in providing comprehensive healthcare system for the people with an equal emphasis on wellness by creating awareness about the right kind of food, exercise, yoga and right lifestyle. An additional target is to open 150,000 wellness and treatment centres by 2022 in India which will offer a strong support to the Indian Healthcare system.

Key Highlights

During the interaction with stakeholders, Dr Vinod Paul emphasized several measures planned to ensure that there is no scope of unwarranted treatments under this scheme and that policymakers are working on putting restriction to surgical procedures like hysterectomies and appendectomies to curb illegal mass surgeries.

He advised the audience to follow the business model of high volume with modest returns instead of low volume with high returns. The scheme is aimed to offer quality treatment in simple clean wards without any frills and will increase the demand of medical facility in tier-2 and tier-3 cities leading to the strengthening of basic healthcare systems.

Dr Paul also mentioned about various packages that the scheme offers. To reduce the time taken for reimbursement, trust model and insurance model will be tried. The delay in reimbursement creates a major roadblock for government run-schemes. Therefore, the scheme aims to settle claims within 20 days.

He urged all the stakeholders to make a fresh start by adopting self-regulation to overcome the deficit of trust among the public due to various recent incidents.

As the format of the session was interactive, Dr Paul answered queries of the stakeholders and urged them to find a middle ground to address the remaining concerns about the implementation of the scheme.