Why in news?

• Union Minister has mooted “Heli-Clinics”/Helicopter Clinics for remote areas, which could help to provide specialized medical care to people living in inaccessible hilly terrains of the States like Jammu & Kashmir and Northeast.

Highlights:

• Benefits of the scheme are portable across the country and a beneficiary covered under the scheme will be allowed to take cashless benefits from any public/private empaneled hospitals across the country.
• Ayushman Bharat will be an entitlement based scheme with entitlement decided on the basis of deprivation criteria in the SECC database.
• One of the core principles of Ayushman Bharat is to co-operative federalism and flexibility to states.
• For giving policy directions and fostering coordination between Centre and States, it is proposed to set up Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission Council (AB-NHPMC) at apex level Chaired by Union Health and Family Welfare Minister.
• States would need to have State Health Agency (SHA) to implement the scheme.
• In partnership with NITI Aayog, a robust, modular, scalable and interoperable IT platform will be made operational which will entail a paperless, cashless transaction
• In the last four years, which include opening of Dialysis Centres in every district hospital, setting up of Wellness Centres and, launch of “Ayushman Bharat”.
• The Minister emphasized the need to incentivize medical practitioners to go to remote rural areas and to provide adequately satisfactory facilities for the government doctors to be able to serve in the rural areas.

Ayushman Bharat:

• Ayushman Bharat is National Health Protection Scheme, which will cover over 10 crore poor and vulnerable families (50 crore beneficiaries) providing coverage upto 5 lakh rupees per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalization.
• Ayushman Bharat – National Health Protection Mission will subsume the on-going centrally sponsored schemes – RashtriyaSwasthyaBimaYojana (RSBY) and the Senior Citizen Health Insurance Scheme (SCHIS).