Studies from King’s College London Update Current Data on Health Systems and Reform [Effects of the Indian National Health Insurance Scheme (PM-JAY) on Hospitalizations, Out-of-pocket Expenditures and Catastrophic Expenditures]: Health and Medicine – Health Systems and Reform

2023 DEC 13 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health & Medicine Business Daily -- Current study results on health systems and reform have been published. According to news reporting originating from London, United Kingdom, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “ABSTRACTIndia launched one of the world’s largest health insurance programs, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY), targeting more than 500 million economically and socially disadvantaged Indians. PM-JAY is publicly funded and covers hospitalization costs in public and private facilities.”

Funders for this research include Indo-german Social Security Programme, Deutsche Gesellschaft Fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit Gmbh; German Federal Ministry For Economic Cooperation And Development (Bmz) And The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The news reporters obtained a quote from the research from King’s College London: “We examine how PM-JAY has affected hospitalizations and out-of-pocket expenditures (OOPE), and given the high use of private health care in India, we compare these outcomes across public and private facilities. We conducted a household survey to collect data on socioeconomic and demographic information, health status and hospitalizations for more than 57,000 PM-JAY eligible individuals in six Indian states. Using multivariate regression models, we estimated whether PM-JAY was associated with any changes in hospitalizations, OOPE and catastrophic health expenditures (CHE) and whether these differed across public and private facilities. We found that PM-JAY was not associated with an increase in hospitalizations, but it increased the probability of visiting a private facility by 4.6% points (p < .05). PM-JAY was associated with a relative reduction of 13% in OOPE (p < .1) and 21% in CHE (p < .01). This was entirely driven by private facilities, where relative OOPE was reduced by 17% (p < .01) and CHE by 19% (p < .01).”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “This implied that PM-JAY has shifted use from public to private hospitalizations. Given the complex healthcare system with the presence of parallel public and private systems in India, our study concludes that for economically and socially disadvantaged groups, PM-JAY contributes to improved access to secondary and tertiary care services from private providers.”

For more information on this research see: Effects of the Indian National Health Insurance Scheme (PM-JAY) on Hospitalizations, Out-of-pocket Expenditures and Catastrophic Expenditures. Health Systems & Reform, 2023,9(1). The publisher for Health Systems & Reform is Taylor & Francis Group.

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/23288604.2023.2227430.

Our news journalists report that more information may be obtained by contacting Divya Parmar, Department of Population Health Sciences, School of Life Course and Population Sciences, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom. Additional authors for this research include Christoph Strupat, Swati Srivastava, Stephan Brenner, Diletta Parisi, Susanne Ziegler, Rupak Neogi, Caitlin Walsh, Manuela De Allegri.

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)