An evaluation of the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) has concluded that the government-financed health insurance scheme had little or no impact on medical impoverishment in India.
In fact, the study found that despite high enrolment in RSBY, catastrophic health expenditures (when medical expenses push a family into poverty), hospitalisation expenditure and the percentage of total household outgo on out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses — medicines and other consumables that are not reimbursed by insurance — have steadily increased, for both in-patients and outpatients, over the last two decades.