NEW DELHI: With the Delhi government and the Centre failing to arrive at an agreement on the Ayushman Bharat scheme, the National Health Agency (NHA) is pushing hard to get at least the private hospitals in the city on board on its own.
However, even as Delhi being the National Capital receives a bulk of its patients from other states, so far only seven — four central government and three private — hospitals in the city are empanelled under the scheme and three more have started the process. A few of the prominent ones such as Sir Ganga Ram Hospital have agreed verbally to be a part of the scheme, officials said.
The health insurance scheme, which aims to provide coverage of Rs 5 lakh per family annually and benefit more than 10 crore poor families across India, has become yet another flashpoint between the PM Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal governments.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) dispensation was earlier planning to implement its own health insurance scheme. It has not yet signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and had written a letter to the NHA, an arm of the Health Ministry implementing the scheme, to tweak the plan and its name to ‘Mukhya Mantri Aam Aadmi Swasthya Bima Yojana’.
The NHA did not agree to the demand. The tussle has resulted in major government hospitals such as Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP), Guru Teg Bahadur (GTB), G B Pant, which see a huge rush of patients from across the city, being left out of the scheme.The scheme may have gained wider acceptance in Delhi if the AAP government had agreed to be a part of it.
“We have asked them (Delhi government) to arrange a meeting to discuss the issue,” said Jitu Lal Meena, Deputy General Manager, Hospital Network and Quality Assurance, NHA. For now, the four Central hospitals in the city - All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Ram Manohar Lohia (RML), Safdarjung, and Lady Hardinge Medical College (LHMC) are on board of the scheme.
As far as private hospitals are concerned, of the 900 such hospitals in the city just, three - Cygnus Sonia Hospital in Nangloi, Dr Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital, and the Cygnus MLS Super Specialty Hospital - have been empanelled.
“The private hospitals have expressed some concerns regarding reimbursement rates. But meetings are being held continuously and we are hoping that soon we will cover majority of these. Three more - Lifeline Hospital in Dwarka, Kalra Hospital in Kirti Nagar, Akash Healthcare in Dwarka - are in the process of being empanelled. A meeting with hospitals such as Max and Apollo has been held and talks are on,” said Meena.
According to the Association of Healthcare Providers, India (AHPI), which represents 2,500 specialty and 8,000 smaller hospitals in the country, Delhi is expected to contribute to the scheme 10,000 state government hospital beds, 5,000 beds of central government hospitals and 35,000 from the private sector.
Who’s in, who’s out