NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Health prepared a Rs 15,000-crore action plan to roll out a National Health Protection Scheme that will provide insurance cover of up to Rs 1 lakh to socially and economically backward people.
Health Minister J P Nadda said that though the Budget allocation for the health insurance scheme was Rs 1,500 crore, the annual spending for it could be Rs 4,500 crore. “This year we got Rs 705 crore the National Health Mission and Rs 900 crore for the dialysis programme,” he said, adding that there was a 21 per cent increase in the total health budget. The health insurance scheme, which was announced in the Budget, will initially be applicable to people who are part of the Socio-Economic Caste Census list and will later be universalised, which means other people who need it can opt for it, Nadda said at a presser here. The scheme would be rolled out in 2017 and the initial corpus of funds allocated would be used for setting up an IT-enabled platform.