Continued reform of publicly funded and publicly provisioned healthcare is the mainstay of India’s health financing policies. Besides, social security arrangements, such as Employees State Insurance (ESI) and Central Government Health Services (CGHS), have existed since 1948 and 1952, respectively. India also has a rapidly growing private health insurance industry. In 2007, a wave of Government Health Insurance (GHI) started with the Rajiv Arogyasri Community Health Insurance Scheme in Andhra Pradesh. Subsequently, RSBY1 and other GHIs came up, and both population and benefit coverage grew significantly

In 2018, a centrally sponsored scheme, Pradhan-Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PMJAY), marked the beginning of a new phase for GHIs. Like existing and previous GHIs, PMJAY also provides cashless hospital care for deprived households2 in a network of hospitals for improved access to hospital care and decreased incidence of catastrophic expenditure. All states and UTs, except Delhi, Odisha, and West Bengal, implement PMJAY with or without a State-GHI. PMJAY claims to provide enhanced benefits than any other GHI, attempts to consolidate multiple state schemes, and aims for functional convergence with other risk pools, e. g. ESI, CGHS, Railways and others. In this sense, PMJAY is India’s most rapidly growing and extensively implemented GHI.