. Ayushman Bharat is a National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM) a new centrally sponsored scheme was launched in 2018. This comes under Ayushman Bharat Mission anchored in the MoHFW. The Scheme has the benefit cover of ₹ 5 lakh per family per year. The target beneficiaries are to be more than 10 crore families belonging to poor and vulnerable population based on Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) database. With this, AB-NHPM will subsume the on- going centrally sponsored schemes–Rashtriya Swasthya BimaYojana (RSBY) and the Senior Citizen Health Insurance Scheme (SCHIS).
Its salient features are numerous and keeping in mind the poor and the destitute. It has a defined benefit cover of ₹ 5 lakh per family per year. This cover will take care of almost all secondary care and most of tertiary care procedures. To ensure that nobody is left out (especially women, children and the elderly) there will be no cap on family size and age. The benefit cover will also include pre and post-hospitalisation expenses. All pre-existing conditions will be covered from day one of the policy. A defined transport allowance per hospitalization will also be paid to the beneficiary; portable benefits including cashless benefits from any public/private empanelled hospitals across the country.
And landless households deriving major part of their income from manual casual labour will be automatically covered. The payments for treatment will be done on package rate (to be defined by the government in advance) basis. The package rates will include all the costs associated with treatment. For beneficiaries, it will be a cashless, paper less transaction. Keeping in view the state specific requirements, states/ UTs will have the flexibility to modify these rates within a limited bandwidth.
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