84% of Indians don’t benefit from govt-run health insurance schemes

The report says that about 84 per cent of the Indian population don’t get benefits of any government-run health insurance scheme and fall prey to exploitative private healthcare service providers.

The report states that only 16 per cent of total population got the benefits of health insurance in rural areas, while the percentage of people getting insurance cover in urban areas stood at 18 per cent. 

The findings of the report clearly indicate that medical facilities to economically deprived sections was in a very pitiable state.

According to the report, the flagship Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY) has benefitted only 13 per cent people in rural areas, and only 12 per cent in urban areas. The scheme was launched in 2008 to cover people living below the poverty line.

The NSSO data points to how rural households were falling into debt-traps on account of getting treatment at private hospitals. It says, 25 per cent took loans or depended on ‘borrowings’ for medical attention in rural areas, while in the case of urban folk it was 18 per cent.

States do provide health cover benefits to its residents, but, according to the NSSO report, the response to state government-sponsored schemes was very poor, in fact as low as 2.9 percent. In the most populous states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar the benefit accrued to just seven and 16 patients respectively.

Relatively high percentage of treatment at public hospitals was reported in the rural areas of Assam (84 per cent), followed by Odisha (76 per cent), Rajasthan (44 per cent) and Tamil Nadu (42 per cent), and in the urban areas it was Odisha (54 per cent), followed by Assam (44 per cent) and Kerala (31 per cent).