New Delhi: More than a third of hospitals empanelled under Ayushman Bharat are inactive, Mint has reported after studying official data.
The report notes that this data is updated daily and at present, 18,783 out of the 27,000 hospitals under the scheme are active.
The Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) has been touted as “the world’s largest health assurance scheme.”
It aims to provide health cover of Rs. 5 lakhs per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation to over 12 crores poor and vulnerable families, covering approximately 55 crore beneficiaries that form the bottom 40% of the Indian population.
The households included are based on the deprivation and occupational criteria of Socio-Economic Caste Census 2011 (SECC 2011) for rural and urban areas respectively.
The Mint report said that 4,682 hospitals had been inactive since 2018, when the scheme was introduced, and had not served a single scheme beneficiary.
The report notes that as many as 3,632 hospitals only turned inactive in the last six months. It is not mentioned if this sudden surge was due to delayed tallying or not.
Notably, the insurance scheme was just one component of Ayushman Bharat. The other had promised the creation of 1,50,000 health and wellness centres (HWCs) by transforming the existing sub-centres and primary health centres.