K'taka Govt mobilising 50 lakh under 'Yeshasvini'

Bangalore, Nov 7: Successfully launching a rural health care scheme in 2002 to bring health care of international standard within reach of Cooperative members, the Karnataka Government was on the verge of bringing under its fold upto 50 lakh Cooperators and their families to make it more self-sustaining.

Talking to UNI here, Karnataka Cooperation Department Secretary P Ravi Kumar said with Family Health Plan Ltd (FHPL) as the implementing agency, the ''Yeshasvini Co-operative Farmers Health Care Scheme''(YCFHCS), had covered over 20 lakh members from over 17,000 societies last year Presently the premium collection and the cost of treatment worked out to be almost the same, Mr Ravi Kumar said, adding that his department was striving to enrol more members to bring down the premium charged on the members further down from the present cost working out to just 40 paise per day.

The members were provided for a coverage of Rs two lakh per year, including Rs one lakh at a stretch for major ailments, he added.

The scheme, under which treatment had been included even for bull gore injuries, snake bites and electrical accidents on farms, had attracted world-wide attention including that of the World Bank for replicating in other parts of the globe, he said, adding that unlike other medical insurance schemes, no exclusions were in the scheme.'' Normally those already found to be having a particular health care problem were not covered by any insurance company, but that was not the case with Yeshasvini, he added.

Roping in as many as 273 hospitals, including Narayana Hrudayalaya, Bangalore, and the Apollo Group of Hospitals so far, over 12,000 surgeries were performed on needy members, he said. The cost of performing a heart surgery worked out to as low as Rs 60,000, he added.

The poor perculation of the insurance culture among the masses in the country and the patriarchial nature of families were some of the dampening factors afflicting the scheme, he said.

In many cases a male member of the family got enrolled under the scheme, leaving other members behind, he said, adding that a lot of follow-up was needed for reenrolling members in many cases.

UNI