Are Publicly Financed Health Insurance Schemes Working in India?

Shamika Ravi and Soft Bergkvist

India Policy Forum, 2015, vol. 11, issue 1, 158-192

Abstract: Since 2003, various government-sponsored health insurance schemes have been implemented in India to offer financial protection against catastrophic health shocks to the poor. Several state governments took the initiative to roll outb their own state-financed health insurance schemes and these were followed by the national government, rolling out the largest of such schemes, the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY) in 2008. These schemes provide fully subsidized cover for a limited package of secondary and tertiary inpatient care, targeting the population below poverty line. This paper analyzes the impact of these state-sponsored health insurance schemes through a literature review and some illustrative empirical work. We find limited impact of these government-sponsored health insurance schemes and provide rationales for this. We also discuss the policy implications of these findings.

Keywords: Publicly Financed Health Insurance Schemes; Health Reforms; Health Financing; RSBY (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G22 H43 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ncaer.org/publication/india-policy-forum-2014-15 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nca:ncaerj:v:11:y:2015:i:2015-1:p:158-192

Access Statistics for this article

India Policy Forum is currently edited by B Ramesh

More articles in India Policy Forum from National Council of Applied Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by B Ramesh ().