National Health Protection Scheme rollout: Bengal officials attend workshop for states

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s rejection of the National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS) notwithstanding, officials from the state health department participated in a two-day NHPS workshop for states that began on Thursday. The only state that did not participate in the deliberations was Tripura, which is in poll mode. Six working groups discussed various aspects of implementation of the scheme and the best practices in the existing state health cover programmes. The recommendations will be discussed on Friday after the working groups make presentations before the whole plenary, including officials from the Ministry of Health, Niti Aayog and the principal secretaries of health from the states. NHPS, a programme that would provide Rs 5 lakh health cover for 10 crore families based on data from the socioeconomic caste census, was announced by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech earlier this month. Since then, there have been hectic parleys towards a nationwide rollout, possibly by August. Confirming the state’s participation in the workshop, West Bengal Principal Secretary (Health) Anil Verma said: “My officers are there at the meeting.” On Tuesday, CM Banerjee had said in Krishnanagar that the state would not “waste” its hard-earned resources on paying 40 per cent of the cost of NHPS. The state’s existing scheme was good enough, she had said. The working groups on Thursday discussed the process, fraud detection mechanisms and information technology enablers for the proposed NHPS and awareness generation. For the purpose of implementation, states have been divided into five categories —- greenfield states with no health cover programme, states where only Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) is running, those that have added a top-up to the Rs 30,000 health cover for migrant workers, states where a programme is running on trust mode, and states that are not part of RSBY but have their own insurance-based health plan. Twenty-four states are already providing some sort of health cover to citizens, though the amount varies between the Rs 30,000 of RSBY and Rs 3,30,000 in Rajasthan. “All states have attended the session with the exception of Tripura. The recommendations of the six working groups will be discussed in front of the entire plenary on Friday, after which rollout plans will be finalised; that is where the five categories come in. We have had some preliminary interactions with the states through video-conferencing, but the final plan will be decided after the workshop,” said a source who was present at the meeting. Source: Indian Express