Govt may send scheme to L-G again for his nod

New Delhi: The Delhi government will most likely send its ‘quality health for all’ scheme in its present form to lieutenant-governor Anil Baijal once agai-n for his approval and will ask for his permission to run the scheme — without the income criteria — for a trial period.

According to the health department officials, the government has enough money in its corpus to fund the scheme to provide free diagnostic tests and surgeries at private centres for all Delhi residents and would want to analyse how it works out during the trial run.

“We have a corpus of around `110 crore, which we think would be eno-ugh to fund the scheme without any income criterion. Before the introduction of the scheme, `6-7 crore was being spent per annum from the corpus to treat poor patients. In the last nine months, after the scheme started, the spending increased to approximately `11 crore. So, we have noticed that there is enough money to fund it without any income cap,” said a senior health official.

Under the scheme, if any patient from Delhi in any state government hospital needs a diagnostic test prescribed by the doctors and if it cannot be done in the hospital for whatever reasons, the patient can get it done from any of the 67 empanelled private labs and hospitals and the government will pay the cost to that private hospital or lab. For a surgery, if the waiting period is more than a month, the patient can get it done in one of the 48 empanelled hospitals.

The lieutenant-governor (L-G) had, however, raised objections and had asked the government that an income criterion should be introduced to avail benefits under the scheme.

The official said that the government will once again approach the L-G to allow running the scheme without any income ceiling for some time to analyse how much spending is required.

A final decision in this connection will be taken next week in a meeting between the health officials and health minister Satyendar Jain.