Is RSBY India's platform to implementing universal hospital insurance?

David M. Dror · Sukumar Vellakkal

49 citations0/0 files storedThe Indian Journal of Medical Research

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Healthcare Systems and Reforms Healthcare Policy and Management Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy

Abstract

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES: In 2008, India's Labour Ministry launched a hospital insurance scheme called Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) covering 'Below Poverty Line' (BPL) households. RSBY is implemented through insurance companies; premiums are subsidized by Union and States governments (75 : 25%). We examined RSBY's enrolment of BPL, costs vs. budgets and policy ramifications. METHODS: Numbers of BPL are obtained by following criteria of two committees appointed for this task. District-specific premiums are weighted to obtain national average premiums. Using the BPL estimates and national premiums, we calculated overall expected costs of full roll-out of the RSBY per annum, and compared it to Union government budget allocations. RESULTS: By March 31, 2011, RSBY enrolled about 27.8 per cent of the number of BPL households following the Tendulkar Committee estimates (37.6% following the Lakdawala Committee criteria). The average national weighted premium was Rs. 530 per household per year in 2011. The expected cost of premium to the union government of enrolling the entire BPL population in financial year (FY) 2010-11 would be Rs. 33.5 billion using Tendulkar count of BPL (or Rs. 24.6 billion following Lakdawala count), representing about 0.3 per cent (or 0.2%, respectively) of the total union budget. The RSBY budget allocation for FY 2010-11 was only about 0.037 per cent of the total union budget, sufficient to pay premiums of only 34 per cent of the BPL households enrolled by March 31, 2011. INTERPRETATION & CONCLUSIONS: RSBY could be the platform for universal health insurance when (i) the budget allocation will match the required funds for maintenance and expansion of the scheme; (ii) the scheme would ensure that beneficiaries' rights are legally anchored; and (iii) RSBY would attract large numbers of premium-paying (non-BPL) households.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.

References

2008Extending health insurance to the rural population: An impact evaluation of China's new cooperative medical scheme 2009The New Cooperative Medical Scheme in rural China: does more coverage mean more service and better health?2008Reducing out-of-pocket expenditures to reduce poverty: a disaggregated analysis at rural-urban and state level in India 2002Better Health Systems for India's Poor : Findings, Analysis, and Options 2008Universal Mandatory Health Insurance In The Netherlands: A Model For The United States?2004Social Health Insurance Systems in Western Europe 2010Ghana's national health insurance scheme in the context of the health MDGs: an empirical evaluation using propensity score matching 2008Universal coverage of health services: tailoring its implementation

Cited by

2013What the Good Doctor Said: A Critical Examination of Design Issues of the RSBY Through Provider Perspectives in Chhattisgarh, India 2014Acceptability of, and willingness to pay for, community health insurance in rural India 2023A Critical Analysis of the World'S Largest Publicly Funded Health Insurance Program: India's Ayushman Bharat

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.