National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS) will be launched from April 1, is likely to provide insurance cover to 70 per cent of the population.
By this scheme, each family will get health cover up to ₹1 lakh as opposed to ₹30,000 under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), the current health insurance scheme.
An additional ₹30,000 will be provided for senior citizens under the NHPS.
Since the number of hospitals added to the network will increase including primary, secondary and tertiary care hospitals, it will potentially improve overall healthcare in the country. Right now there are 18,000 hospitals under the RSBY.
At the initial stage, this scheme is going to help 10 crore families within India. The government is targeting to make this scheme available for the BPL families within India.
Apart from those families, people who are within the list of deprivations according to the socio-economic caste census data shall also have this facility.
One of the major aspects of this scheme is, it will also launch the Renal Dialysis, so that people won’t have to travel to a long distance and bear the high cost for the renal dialysis procedure. Within this program, every district hospital shall have options of renal dialysis. 2000 new dialysis centers shall be developed in this program. Every dialysis costs around Rs 2000 and this brings the annual expenditure of an individual to Rs 3 Lakh. But it will become free of cost now.
Apart from that, this scheme will also launch 3000 more generic medical centers throughout the country. This will deal with the shortage of drugs within the rural areas. Well, this is definitely great news for those people residing in the rural areas, but it is not sure yet how the bigger pharmaceutical companies shall react to this situation. Because this initiative might reduce a portion of the business of the bigger pharmaceuticals that offer general drugs for people.