Telangana mulls over Ayushman Bharat

HYDERABAD: Telangana will not join the Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM) immediately and will ‘study’ the scheme for two to three months before taking a decision, said state health minister C Laxma Reddy on Monday.
So far, Telangana has not signed the Ayushman Bharat scheme and has expressed reservations on the likely ‘implementation issues’.
“In Telangana, we already have similar schemes running smoothly, covering 77.19 lakh families.The state government is spending Rs 2,000 crore each year on various health schemes. The Ayushman Bharat scheme aims to cover 26.11 lakh families. If we implement the scheme, identifying these 26.11 lakh families will be a difficult task. Also, the remaining 51.08 lakh families will not get the benefits,” said C Laxma Reddy, minister for health and family welfare, Telangana state.
The state government however supported the implementation of the scheme and have also provided required software and technical inputs. Earlier this year, National Health Agency had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Government of Telangana to customize and expand the existing state scheme platform in a way amenable to all states and Union territories. “Since this is a new scheme, we will need to understand the implementation issues before we can take a decision on it,” added the minister.