Online PhD defence Rajesh Kamath
Supervisor: Em. Prof. Dr. Helmut Brand
Co-supervisor: Dr. Timo Clemens
Keywords: Publicly funded health insurance, Ayushman Bharat, Out-of-pocket expenditure, India
"India’s Ayushman Bharat: Assessing the Impact of Publicly Funded Health Insurance in India"
In 2018, India launched Ayushman Bharat, a government health insurance scheme that covers hospital care for about 500 million of its poorest people. It is the largest publicly funded health insurance programme in the world. This thesis asked whether the scheme protects families from paying for healthcare out of their own pockets. It combined a review of the published evidence, analyses of two rounds of India’s National Family Health Survey across states and districts, and interviews with health science students about India’s new digital health system. More people now have health insurance, but this has not reliably reduced what families pay. Families still paid for caesarean deliveries in government hospitals, where this care is supposed to be free, and the thesis found no evidence that insurance reduced these costs. The scheme pays for hospital stays but not for outpatient visits or long-term medicines, so it does little for long-term conditions such as high blood pressure.
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