Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojna (AB-PMJAY), one of the most ambitious schemes of the Modi government, has completed 100 days on Monday, since its launch in September 2018.
In this span of time, under the AB-PMJAY, which is being considered the world’s largest public health care scheme, over 6,95,310 patients were treated in various empanelled private and public hospitals across India. Around 5.1 lakh claims have been availed of the scheme, for which payment has been released.
Soon after the scheme was launched in September 2018, the usual Modi-haters had latched on to the opportunity to spread misinformation about the scheme, but, the splendid success of this endeavour will now probably force them to eat their own words.
The Narendra Modi’s flagship health insurance scheme, Ayushman Bharat, aims to provide health insurance coverage to more than 10 crore poor families in the country. As per the latest Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) data, 8.03 crore rural households and another 2.33 crore urban households will be covered under this scheme.
Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, calling this scheme a ‘game changer’ said, as many as 6.85 lakh poor patients have been provided free hospital treatment in the first 100 days of the launch of the programme. He further said, on an average 5,000 claims are being settled every day since its rollout on September 23, 2018.
In a Facebook post titled ‘100 days of Ayushman Bharat’, Jaitley anticipated that as awareness of the scheme increases over the years, almost 1 crore families will start benefitting every year.
“We are pleased with the initial momentum of PMJAY. We are now focusing on deepening the scheme in “greenfield” states, ensuring that no fraud or abuse takes place, assuring the quality of services and keeping our Information Technology (IT) system safe and robust,” said Indu Bhushan, CEO, AB-PMJAY.
“Greenfield States are those, where there was no health insurance scheme earlier such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar, Haryana, (Madhya Pradesh (MP), Himachal Pradesh (HP), Jammu & Kashmir and Jharkhand,” he said.
Currently, around 16000 government, as well as private hospitals, are amongst the enlisted hospitals, which are also expected to increase with time.
On December 2, the first open heart surgery was successfully facilitated under ‘Modicare’, a scheme which has been receiving admiration from all over the world. The Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) has praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Ayushman Bharat and called it a “great commitment”.
Along with this, various other scheme’s launched by the Modi government had grabbed appreciation from the World Health Organisation (WHO), which had praised the Modi government for its efforts to curb air pollution through one of its flagship schemes of Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, which aims to safeguard the health of women and children by providing them with clean cooking fuel.
The WHO had also reported that the Swachh Bharat Grameen mission has been able to prevent over 3 lakh deaths due to sanitation-related infectious diseases during 2014 and 2018.