Health Insurance And Sustainable Development: An Emperical Analysis
International Journal of Development Research
Health Insurance And Sustainable Development: An Emperical Analysis
Received 27th December, 2018; Received in revised form 03rd January, 2019; Accepted 06th February, 2019; Published online 31st March, 2019
Copyright © 2019, Vijayalakshmi, M. and Dr. Ravindra Kumar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Health is an important constituent of sustainable development. It not only enhances human efficiency but also leads to a decline in private and public expenditures on sickness and disease. Health care is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health financing is the method of gaining the source of revenue in health services. Health Insurance is a mechanism by which a person protects himself from financial loss caused due to accident or disability. Multiple of health insurance schemes are introduced and implemented by the central and state governments in India in collaboration as well as independent of each other. Since the liberalisation of insurance sector private companies and NGOs also introduced several health insurance programmes. Health insurance sector has made tremendous progress in terms of expenditure and product. Yeshaswini Cooperative Farmers Health Care Scheme (Yeshaswini Health Insurance Scheme) is the most popular and successful programme, initiated by the Karnataka State Government on 1st June 2003, implemented through a network hospitals to provide cashless quality healthcare facilities to the co-operative farmers of Karnataka. The Central Government announced the Ayushman Bharath (National Health Protection Mission) in the 2018-19 budget which is implemented across the country. Karnataka Government subsumed the Yeshaswini scheme with the central scheme of Ayushman Bharat in November 2018. But recently the honourable CM of Karnataka announced the re-launch of Yeshaswini programme independently as earlier. This is high time to discuss the possible impact of merging or continuation of the scheme. The paper discusses impact of most popular health insurance scheme in Karnataka i.e., Yeshaswini health insurance scheme and possible impact of subsuming this scheme with most ambitious programme of the central government i.e., Ayushman Bharat.