Comprehensive Health Insurance required in India

In India about 157 million households [62% of population] live with < 1 lac per year household income. The economics of these people works very different from that we can imagine. I recently saw a household maid suffering from uro-genital infection. She could have been easily treated by high-end antibiotics; total cost of treatment in private sector would be about INR 2000 whereas her monthly income is about the same. She has the option of going to a Govt run hospital, but there the cost of lost wages due to long waiting and lack of easy access to medication deter her from getting treated. There is an urgent need of a comprehensive and unifying health insurance system for the whole population, not just RSBY for BPL. This comprehensive and unifying health insurance system probably can be a PPP model between the Govt and Private sector insurance.


Currently private health insurance penetration is only about 2% in India. That too it is targeting the upper crust of 200 million population. There are no viable economic insurance solutions for the rest of the 800 million in India. What are we doing by aping the west? We need our own models.