Five authorities, including the National Health Commission ("NHC"), have recently issued the Implementing Plan for the Tough Three-Year Health and Medical Assistance Program for Poverty Alleviation (the "Plan").
The Plan states that, by the year 2020, the basic medical insurance, the insurance for serious diseases, service management for the signing of insurance policies, and public health services will cover all impoverished population in rural areas; it is also expected to greatly improve the capacity for and the availability of medical and health services in poverty-stricken regions, enable impoverished people to receive timely and effective treatment of their serious diseases and long-term and chronic diseases, take effective control of serious infectious diseases and endemic diseases previously rampant in distressed areas, significantly improve work on health education and health promotion, and see an obvious improvement to health qualities of people residing in poor areas. To this end, the Plan outlines tasks in six aspects, including "targetedly launching a three-year tough battle for curing serious diseases and chronic diseases which the impoverished population suffers from". The Plan calls for efforts to realize the coverage of all eligible residents and take comprehensive measures to ensure people's health conditions. Further measures will also be taken to push forward the integration of the basic medical insurance systems for urban and rural residents and raise the level of medical insurance benefits in a fair and inclusive manner. Also, the payment of medical expenses for serious diseases from the medical insurance fund will be increased; the payment threshold will be halved and the proportion of medical expenses that could be reimbursed will rise by five percentage points, for rural impoverished population, and the upper bound of the reimbursed amount will be increased gradually and cancelled eventually.