The E-Mail Thread preceding my writing on Health Insurance

Dear All,

Most of you who have been connected with the Health issues in AID are getting increasingly interested in the Health Insurance schemes in general and community based health insurance for the under served. Particularly people are increasingly asking me the question after reading articles on one Insurance scheme, which is high on PR called Yeshaswini scheme in Karnataka. There have been many articles written on this scheme. One such article written by a globalised economist, Swaminathan Ankaleshwar Aiyar who wrote recently wrote in Times of India about “Miracles for Rs. 7.50” Read the news article http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1080153.cms. and Devi Shetty himself writing about this scheme http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=77940 ( forwarded by Shekhar last week asking my opinion on this). One more has been forwarded to us by Dr. Sujit Sinha as well. After some of these movements some of you have been off and on asking me the question about health insurance in general and Yeshaswini in particular. So I thought I will put some perspective to the whole issue of health insurance and then come to Yashaswini in particular. The reason is that Deva (Devadasan) of ACCORD ( listed by Dr. Sujit as one of the speakers at the West Bengal event) is a society member of CHC and one of my close friends did a small research on Yashaswini and since I was discussing this issue on a daily basis with her, I know some of the inside stories of the scheme than just the “PR” side of the scheme. I would like to endorse some of the observations of Dr. Sujit and also add some more comments to the same.

The email thread:

The article attached is less on rigour (not quoting references etc., ) and more on the perspective building side%2