It’s blame game between the Health department and Insurance company as both are pointing their fingers towards each other for the folly due to which health cards of many dead and ineligible persons were made under Mukhyamantri Swasthya Bima Yojna (MSBY).
The Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of Dehradun, Dr SP Agarwal had put the blame of mass discrepancies in preparation of health card on the insurance company. He said that the problem occurred due to wrong data entry by the Third Party Administrator (TPA) of Insurance company.
When contacted the State head of TPA ‘Med Save health care Sanjay Kaul told The Pioneer that the Health department was wrongly blaming the TPA. He said the department deployed semi literate Asha workers for very important task of survey and data collection due to which errors like filling wrong information in the pre-printed forms with URN occurred.
It is learnt that the ASHA workers were assured that they would be given a sum of Rs20 for each card, and in their eagerness to earn more money they filled the forms of ineligible people too.
Kaul said his company asked the Health department officials to provide them with separate data of eligible and ineligible persons which they never provided.
“I had written three mails mentioning the problems of insufficient data to the health department officials during the process of enrolment, but they never cared to respond”, he claimed. The top ranking TPA officials said that the health department should have handed over the task of survey to some experienced agency. He however admitted that errors could have occurred in the process of data entry as the company hired many people for the mammoth task of uploading details of more than 3.5 lakh persons in Dehradun.
One of a senior official of United India Insurance company said that the health insurance scheme is very good for the people of the state but the errors occurred due to large number involved and unnecessary haste adopted by senior state government officials.