Budget 2020: Health sector gets handful of benefits

It’s that time of the year, when every common man gets a high hope to get some good news from the Government. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman presented Budget 2020 on Saturday, 1^st February. Health sector gets Rs. 69000 of allocation. She also declared that India would be TB free by 2025.

Focus on PMABY

The different schemes running by the government will also get good funds to improve the health sector. Sitharaman stressed on expanding Pradhan Mantri Ayushman Bharat Yojna (PMABY), by saying that it is the world’s largest government-funded health assurance scheme.

The expansion of Ayushman Bharat scheme will see setting up and development of more hospitals in Tier-II, Tier-III cities under the PPP model, which, the FM said will be funded from the proceeds from taxes on medical devices.

PMJAY gets attention

Also Rs. 6000 crore has been allocated to Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojna. It is a sub part of PMABY, which aims at providing health insurance cover of Rs. 5 lakhs per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalization to over 10.74 crores poor and vulnerable families (approximately 50 crore beneficiaries). There is no cap on the family size under the scheme.

PM-JAY has been rolled out for the bottom 40% of poor and vulnerable population. The households included are based on the deprivation and occupational criteria of Socio-Economic Caste Census 2011 (SECC 2011) for rural and urban areas respectively.

TB free India by 2025

Budget 2020 becomes more special when apart from these, the announcement of Nirmala Sitharaman – by 2025, TB will be completely eradicated from the country, is a big news. According to WHO report 2019, India has 27 percent of TB patients of the total world TB patients.

As per the report published in Economic Times, 10 million people had TB in 2018. While 26,90,000 people had TB in India, out of which 19,90,000 were notified. The report also says that TB kills 1.5 million every year and is the leading killer of people living with HIV/AIDD and a major cause of deaths due to anti-microbial resistance.

India also had maximum number of drug resistant TB which is 27 per cent of a total 130,000 drug-resistant TB cases while China had 14 per cent such cases. Globally, 7 million new cases.