The Prayas ePathshala

Exams आसान है !

Q1. Describe how the Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY) improved a variety of health outcomes.

GS II – Government Policies and Interventions

Introduction:

PMJAY is a large health insurance/assurance plan that offers up to?Each family receives Rs. 5 lakh per year as a family floater. It is a centrally sponsored scheme that is completely funded by the Indian government.

PMJAY proposes to address the following health-spending issue in India:

Out-of-Pocket Expenditures (OOPE): India has one of the highest levels of OOPE, which directly leads to the prevalence of catastrophic expenditures and poverty.
Expensive Private Sector: The majority of healthcare in India is provided by the private sector. They do, however, charge significantly more than government hospitals for the same service, and higher costs do not ensure improved quality.

The disease burden is high:

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) account for around 65% of all mortality in India, with ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and stroke being the leading causes.
Communicable Diseases: India has the highest prevalence of tuberculosis, leprosy, and hepatitis in the world. All main communicable illnesses are prevalent in India.
Implications for Poverty: If even one family member suffers from a serious illness, it has the potential to deplete all of a family’s funds, relegating the family to poverty
As a result, suitable reserves must be made in the form of insurance product investments to ensure that any dependant expenditure on health does not imperil a family’s financial status.

Impact:

It helped to enhance numerous health outcomes in states that implemented the ambitious plan to provide healthcare to the most vulnerable populations.
It boosted health benefits and disease detection by increasing health insurance coverage.
According to the Economic Survey of 2020-21, PMJAY states have higher penetration of health insurance, lower infant and child mortality rates, improved access and utilisation of family planning services, and increased HIV/AIDS knowledge.
It delivers business to the 24,215 hospitals that have been accredited, and how much are extended treatments worth?7.490 billion rupees (with a total of 1.55 billion hospital admissions).
Patients with PMJAY health cards are more likely to visit rural empanelled clinics, which encourages private investment in rural health. This motivates them to develop hospitals in outlying areas.
Increases the savings rate: The savings rate is one of the most important factors in a country’s long-term growth. This technique allocates a portion of one’s money to savings.

Scheme Implementation Limitations: The scheme’s influence is limited by the following factors:

Only seven states have more than 72% of private empanelled hospitals: Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab, and Karnataka.
Medical fraud is common in the private sector hospital because patients do not question the necessity of the procedures. 63% of PM-JAY claims and 75% of total claim amount are handled by private institutions.
Unnecessary Procedures: Private hospitals are more likely to participate in fraud and abuse than public hospitals, and they are more likely to discharge patients early post-surgery to save money. In terms of value, private hospitals provide the majority of the top PM-JAY packages, including knee replacement, cataract surgery, haemodialysis, and cardiovascular surgery.
Clinical and support services had better infrastructure than government counterparts, according to a National Health Agency study.
It restricts governments’ freedom to set their own industry policies. Several state governments have created or expanded health-care schemes with varying degrees of coverage. As a result, Telangana, Odisha, and Delhi have not signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the newly constituted National Health Agency (NHA) to carry out the scheme.

Conclusion:

As a result, ensuring accountability in the private sector is difficult. To ensure that the private sector is not intentionally increasing medical expenses, the National Health Agency must conduct frequent medical audits. Furthermore, relying on the private sector does not justify ignoring public spending. According to the economic analysis, raising public investment from 1% to 2.5-3% of GDP, as recommended in the National Health Policy 2017, can cut OOPE from 65% to 30% of overall healthcare cost.

Q2. Examine the dangers of monopolistic tendencies in the digital economy.

GS III – Indian Economy related issues

Monopoly is a commercial phenomenon in which a single vendor sells a single commodity. It is a concern since the pricing of such things is sometimes substantially higher than the fair value, which is in the consumers’ best interests.
In the digital economy, such trends are frequent. For example, Google has a search engine monopoly, while Facebook, which also owns Whatsapp and Instagram, has a social network monopoly.

The risks linked with such monopolies are as follows:

Because it is unclear how the data is used, there is a lack of transparency. In a competitive market, each product is described and priced publicly, so the market is aware of the implications of each product.
Difficulty determining fair value: Because people don’t know how to price their personal information, determining the value of what is obtained in exchange for what is given is challenging.
Anti-competitive: It is detrimental to the interests of emerging enterprises. Data is a public-domain commodity, but it is viewed as an exclusive and competing good.
Affects customer preferences: There is a risk that consumers will be mislead by a single company.
Political ramifications: For example, Twitter, which has a monopoly on short messaging format services, has restricted tweets from former US Presidents. It demonstrates how much power these titans possess. They have command of the information flow.
Data control: These foreign IT behemoths have extensive control over data belonging to Indian citizens. This raises the problem of ‘data sovereignty’.
Breach risk: Examples such as Cambridge Analytica and Wikileaks reveal that the data stored by these tech behemoths is not as secure as previously imagined. This can be abused and have far-reaching consequences.

Solutions to such monopolies include:

Legislation: Data regulation can be enforced by the government through legislation, reducing the concerns mentioned above.
‘Informed’ Consent: The procedures for obtaining consent must be made simpler and more transparent in order for the consent to be meaningful.
Data localisation: Both the RBI and the government have recently emphasised the importance of data localisation in order to decrease risks, notably financial ones. The government has also introduced the Data Protection Bill, which tackles this issue by requiring data to be saved in India.
Home-grown tech titans: The government can grant subsidies to home-grown tech start-ups through Make in India programmes, which can help us create our own tech titans.

Conclusion:

There is thus a twin issue in the scenario where we cannot regulate the monopolies. On the one hand, we must enable the digital economy in order to get more efficiencies. On the other side, the digital economy must be regulated. The Justice BN Srikrishna committee’s proposals address these issues. We must expedite the approval of the data protection measure in order to build a framework for digital economy regulation as soon as possible.