Ten years after the smooth implementation of Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), on Monday, Kerala will move to a new health insurance programme, Karunya Arogya Suraksha Paddhati (KASP), which will offer an enhanced health coverage of ₹5 lakh to the entire beneficiary family.
Despite the uncertainties over the change-over, that too on a new IT platform, the 40.96 lakh beneficiary families currently enrolled under RSBY and the 600-odd empanelled public and private service providers (hospitals) are expected to make a seamless transfer to the new scheme, KASP, in phases.
KASP is Kerala’s new integrated health protection scheme, a merger of various health financing schemes in the State, including Karunya as well as Centre’s Ayushman Bharat-Prime Minister’s Jan Arogya Yojana.
No disruption in access
Even though there were apprehensions that the launch of KASP might be delayed and that treatment may be denied to erstwhile beneficiaries of RSBY, Comprehensive Health Insurance Agency of Kerala (CHIAK), the State health authority implementing the scheme, has clarified that all beneficiaries reporting to empanelled hospitals will have access to treatment.
The officials were not explicit about the arrangements as the Election Commission’s clearance for the launch of the new scheme has not yet been formally received. However, it is learnt that arrangements had been made in the empanelled hospitals itself for the enrolment and issue of new KASP beneficiary cards to all former RSBY beneficiaries from Monday. “On April 1, no current RSBY cardholder will be denied access to care at any empanelled hospital. However, since biometric identification has been done away with, to access treatment, beneficiaries will have to bring along their Aadhaar card,” senior CHIAK officials said.
Enrolment camps
This will be a temporary arrangement to ensure that no one is denied access to care. Once the general elections are over, enrolment camps would be conducted for RSBY beneficiaries to move over to KASP. Meanwhile, sources said that much of the delay in preparedness for KASP has been because of the Health Department’s insistence on integrating the Unique Health Identification Number (UHID) generated for citizens under the e-health programme with the KASP software.
“The National Health Authority, which is providing the software, later said that UHID cannot be integrated with its software. Moreover, in these past five years of e-health, only two lakh UHIDs have been created in Kerala while we are talking about enrolling two crore people into the new insurance programme. We will capture demographic details for KASP enrolment from the Aadhaar server as was done earlier,” a senior official said.