Over 59.7 million beneficiaries across the country have availed of free hospitalisation benefits worth Rs 75,162 crore so far after Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) was rolled out in September 2018.
PMJAY offers Rs 5,00,000-a-year free health cover to 107 million poor households in the country, roughly covering the bottom 40% population of the country.
In terms of the number of beneficiaries, Tamil Nadu tops all states with authorised hospital admissions of 0.91 million so far, followed, by Karnataka (6.73 million), Rajasthan (5.74 million) and Kerala (5.47 million). The trend indicates that states with higher per capita income benefit more from the pro-poor flagship, largely indicating better awareness of the central schemes and efforts made by them to get the benefit for their people.
Bihar, the third largest populated state with a very low per capita income, is one of the least beneficiary states of the scheme. The most populated state Uttar Pradesh also ranks ninth in getting the benefit under the scheme.
The Centre launched the scheme on September 23, 2018, to alleviate the suffering of people due to the rising cost of healthcare. According to an estimate about 62% of healthcare costs were borne out of pocket pushing millions of Indians into poverty every year.
Under PMJAY, close to 2,000 procedures are available for beneficiaries to get cashless treatment which includes all the costs related to treatment, medicines, supplies, diagnostic services, physician’s fees, room charges, surgeon charges, OT & ICU charges, etc.
The top speciality care treatments availed by beneficiaries to date are: cardiology (Rs 4,223 crore), general medicine (Rs 4,103 crore), general surgery (Rs 3,896 crore), orthopaedics (Rs 3,651 crore) and medical oncology/cancer treatment (Rs 2,611 crore).
Among the procedures availed by the people, hemodialysis topped the chart with 6.4 million, followed by screening for Covid-19 (4 million).
PM-JAY is being implemented in 33 States and Union Territories (UTs) except for Delhi, Odisha, and West Bengal, denying millions of their population free healthcare even though some of them have their own schemes.
