When the world’s biggest healthcare scheme works, it allows tens of thousands of Indians petrified of the catastrophic cost of hospital treatment to breathe easy – Indians such as Mahesh Kumar Sharma, a 60-year-old farmer from Madhya Pradesh who is a patient at the National Heart Institute in the capital, Delhi.
A top cardiologist, Dr OP Yadava, has carried out open-heart surgery to replace his mitral valve. The immaculate ward, medicine, food, tests and treatment are of the same standard provided to paying patients at the institute. But for Sharma, it is all free.
