Hindus want health plans to cover yoga

Hindus are asking health insurance plans to cover multi-faceted yoga, thus making it more accessible and affordable.

Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that yoga reportedly promoted physical and mental health, cut down hospital/doctor visits and medical services, reduced stress, and was kind of a preventive medicine. How long could health insurers and lawmakers/policymakers overlook highly beneficial and cost-effective yoga? Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, asked.

Moreover, prevention dollar saved hundreds/thousands of dollars in the long run. Yoga could be part of the solution to save health care costs, Rajan Zed pointed out.

Zed indicated that yoga, referred as “a living fossil”, was a mental and physical discipline, for everybody to share and benefit from, whose traces went back to around 2,000 BCE to Indus Valley civilization.

Rajan Zed further said that yoga, although introduced and nourished by Hinduism, was a world heritage and liberation powerhouse to be utilized by all. According to Patanjali who codified it in Yoga Sutra, yoga was a methodical effort to attain perfection, through the control of the different elements of human nature, physical and psychical.

According to US National Institutes of Health, yoga may help one to feel more relaxed, be more flexible, improve posture, breathe deeply, and get rid of stress. According to a recently released “2016 Yoga in America Study”, about 37 million Americans (which included many celebrities) now practice yoga; and yoga is strongly correlated with having a positive self image. Yoga was the repository of something basic in the human soul and psyche, Zed added.