Opinion | How Ayushman Bharat Changed What It Means To Be Poor And Sick In India

Coverage runs to Rs 5 lakh per family per year, absorbing the cost of more than 1,393 treatments and diagnostics

In rural Uttar Pradesh, selling a motorcycle to pay for surgery is not an exceptional event. It is a commonplace one, the kind that does not produce statistics because it leaves no formal trace. The hospital visit ends. The motorcycle is gone. Nothing is recorded.

India’s out-of-pocket health spending was at nearly 68 per cent of total health expenditure by the WHO’s 2017 global standards as the world average sat at 18.2 per cent. It was a sign of how far the state had absented itself from what happened when its citizens fell ill. Before 2018, more than six crore Indians were tipped into poverty every year by medical expenses they had no way to plan for. Ayushman Bharat was, at its core, an attempt to reverse that absence. Whether it has done so entirely is contested. That it tried at an unprecedented scale is not.

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What the Scheme Is, and What It Promises

PM-JAY, launched in September 2018, offers secondary and tertiary hospitalisation coverage to approximately 50 crore individuals across 12 crore households—roughly the bottom 40 per cent of India’s population. Coverage runs to Rs 5 lakh per family per year, absorbing the cost of more than 1,393 treatments and........

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