Public health experts, including doctors from the AIIMS, Wednesday questioned the potential of government's flagship healthcare scheme, Ayushman Bharat, claiming it was an "official channel" through which public money will go to the private sector.

Referring to implementation of such healthcare schemes in the past, sector experts pressed for urgent need to strengthen publicly funded hospitals to offer universal health care, while speaking at a panel discussion on 'Ayushman Bharat: Fact and Fiction', organised by AIIMS Front for Social Consciousness in the campus of country's premiere medical institution here.

The Ayushman Bharat scheme was nothing but an old wine in a new bottle, said Dr Vikas Bajpai, professor at the Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

He stressed on the need to analyse the "failures" of the various publicly-funded health insurance schemes, including the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana or RSBY, to ensure that "inadequacies" in their implementation were not repeated.

"Apart from lack of desire to commit the required financial resources, the scheme is oblivious and irrespective of the real causes of ill-health of the people, especially the poor," he said.

"This was the creation of just another official channel through which public money will go to private set-ups," Dr Bajpai added.

Subroto Sinha, head of department of Biochemistry at AIIMS, said Ayushman Bharat does not provide out-patient department care support, which is a major component of health expenditures and is as expensive as the in-patient care.

"Also, the main thrust of any healthcare programme should always be on improving and strengthening the public health infrastructure as insurance is always less efficient than direct provision of health services by the government," he said.