Since the inception of the Sehat Card programme seven years ago, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has given free healthcare to two million people, with people aged 30-50 being the primary beneficiaries.
The report issued by the Sehat Card Plus programme revealed that 552,266 KP residents between the ages of 31 and 50 had used cashless healthcare since 2015, followed by 500,506 between the ages of 11 and 30 and 450,681 between the ages of 51 and 70. In addition, 149,629 people over the age of 71 and 121,951 children under the age of ten benefited from the PTI government’s flagship micro-health Insurance initiative.
In 2015, the project was introduced in four districts with the collaboration of the German bank KfW, covering 3% of the province’s population. It will be extended to 51% of the population next year, 69% in 2017, and the entire province in 2020. According to the report, the programme now covers all 9.7 million families in the province, including both settled and recently merged tribal districts.
According to officials, those who qualify can receive free health services worth up to Rs1 million per year. The KP model of the Sehat Card has been started in Balochistan, Punjab, parts of Sindh, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and Gilgit-Baltistan.
The report added that private hospitals still receive the lion’s share of the program’s patient care funding. A total of 1,100 hospitals have been appointed for the initiative all across the country, with the majority of them being private.
Moreover, of the total Rs48.271 billion that the government spent on the Sehat Card programme, Rs34.196 billion went to private hospitals and Rs14.075 billion to public hospitals, for a 71:29 split. While the income of public hospitals from the programme increased slightly, with their share increasing to 13% from 2016 to 2020, 27% in 2021, 30% in the fiscal year 2022, and 36% by December 2022.