Kerala launches a insurance plan 'Total health for all'

Aiming at total health for all and providing a “cash less” treatment, the State Government would launch a health insurance scheme on October 2 benefiting both the BPL and APL categories.

The Labour Minister P K Gurudasan told reporters that the Centrally sponsored Rashtriya Swasthya Bhima Yojana (RSBY) covering the entire below poverty line category and the state sponsored Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme (CHIS), covering the entire non-RSBY population will be launched in all the 14 districts in the first phase itself.

The schemes would cover all the BPL families and also other deserving families. The RSBY ensures maximum amount of Rs 30,000 for a family of five and the treatment can be availed of from the empanelled government, ESI and private hospitals based on package rates, he said.

The non-RSBY population will be divided in two categories - those belonging to the BPL list of the government but not to the list defined by the Central Planning Commission - and the APL families that belong neither to the government list nor to the list prepared as per the guidelines of Planning Commission.

The beneficiary contribution will be Rs 30 per family per annum for RSBY and families belonging to the first category in the CHIS.

With regard to the latter, the contribution will be paid by the government while APL families will make the payment themselves. The annual premium for the APL categories will be Rs 506.

The main attraction of the insurance scheme for the APL category is that there is no age limit for joining. About 780 medical and surgical interventions have been identified which will be covered under this scheme.

A committee has been constituted to fix the package rates of surgeries for which private hospitals will enter into an agreement with the insurance company, said Gurudasan.

A separate agency called Comprehensive Health Insurance Agency of Kerala has been created for the implementation of the scheme. A high-power supervisory council to monitor the scheme has been constituted with Labour and Health Ministers and secretaries from the departments concerned as its members.