Going by the initial trend, the average hospitalisation cost per person works out to be around Rs 15,000, higher than Rs 10,000 estimated by the NITI Aayog.
Over two lakh beneficiaries have availed hospitalisation benefits worth Rs 300 crore in the first 51-days of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY), which offers Rs 5-lakh-a-year free health cover to 10.7 crore households.
Going by the initial trend, the average hospitalisation cost per person works out to be around Rs 15,000, higher than Rs 10,000 estimated by the NITI Aayog. However, this is too early to gauge the long-term average hospitalisation cost under the scheme.
“Over 5 lakh e-cards have been distributed and 33 states/UTs have joined the scheme,” the National Health Agency, which administers PM-JAY, said in a tweet. Bulk of the beneficiaries are from Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Assam, an official said. The cost of the healthcare benefits is across three models under implementation for PM-JAY: trust, insurance and hybrid (mix of insurance and trust models).
Of 33 states/Union territories, which are on board for the scheme, 18 are under trust model with costs covered by the Centre and states from the corpus created from the contribution by the Centre and states. Only seven are under the insurance mode, while eight are under a hybrid model where part of the cover is under the insurance model and the rest under the trust model.