Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy said the Andhra Pradesh (A.P.) government has widened the scope of the Ayushman Bharat scheme due to the inadequacy of the number of procedures covered by it (1,000), by bringing in its own health insurance program YSR Aarogyasri under which insurance is provided for 1,446 more procedures.
Answering questions in a public session on ‘Future-proofing Health Systems’ at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Monday, Mr. Reddy said his government distributed 1.44 crore Aarogyasri cards and raised the annual income limit to ₹5 lakh to enable more households to get a total of 2,446 procedures done under Aarogyasri. Nearly 25 lakh households have benefited from the scheme in the past three years, he said.
Referring to the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Reddy said having learned quite a few lessons from the pandemic, the A.P. government laid greater emphasis on taking healthcare to the grassroots level through village secretariats, and an army of volunteers and accredited social health activists.
During two years of the pandemic, the CM said, 44 house-to-house surveys were conducted and vaccines were administered to almost all the vulnerable people as preventive measures.
By focusing on tracing, testing, and treating the Covid patients, A.P. could achieve a mortality rate of 0.63%, which was the lowest among all States compared to the national-level mortality rate of 1.21%, Mr. Reddy added.
He said 16 new medical colleges were being set up along with hospitals to make up for the lack of super-specialty hospitals, which the State suffered post-bifurcation. Being a newly-formed State, A.P. is short on tertiary care, he pointed out.
Village clinics were being established for every 2,000 population. Besides, primary health centres were being strengthened with each one of the doctors given designated villages to attend to the people there every week, Mr. Reddy told the audience.
This would eventually mould the doctors into ‘family physicians’ who can call patients by name and know every health issue individually, he added.
AstraZeneca AB chairman Leif Johansson, UNICEF executive director Catherine Russel, Access to Medicine Foundation CEO Jayasree K. Iyer, and Shanti Ashram president Kezevino Aram were the other distinguished speakers.
