Budget 2023 | India to invest more in flagship health insurance scheme Ayushman Bharat PMJAY

Rs 7,200 crore has been allocated to the Ayushman Bharat - Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna (PMJAY) under the Budget 2023. This is a increase of Rs 743 crore or 11.5 percent from its FY23 allocation of Rs 6,457 crore.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented these numbers under the Union Budget FY24 in front of the Parliament in Delhi on Wednesday.

The finance ministry revised its FY23 budget estimate by Rs 30 crore from Rs 6,457 crore to Rs 6,427 crore. The actual expenditure for FY22 on PMJAY was Rs 3,116 crore, less than half of what the government spent between 2022-2023.

The PMJAY is the Centre's flagship health insurance scheme which was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his Independence Day speech in 2018. It provides a health cover of Rs 5 lakh per year to 107.4 million poor and vulnerable families each.

It is the world's largest government-funded health protection scheme.

According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 42.1 million hospital admissions worth Rs 49,468.60 crore had been authorised under the AB-PMJAY as of December 14, 2022.

A November 2019 report by the National Health Authority announced that they were developing guidelines to publicly identify and discredit individuals who had deceitfully obtained benefits from the health insurance plan.

Nearly 3,000 suspicious cases amounting to Rs 4.5 crore had been sent for investigation to states by the AB-PMJAY, MoneyControl had reported. The NHA had managed to audit hospitals and recover fraudulent claims worth an additional Rs 2.29 crore.

The voluntary organisation said the PMJAY should be allocated a much larger amount of Rs 1.6 lakh crore if it is to provide funding at the Central Government Health Scheme Level. No such announcement was made by the finance minister on Wednesday when she presented the 2023 Budget.