Recently, three departments, including the State Medical Insurance Administration ("SMIA"), have jointly distributed the Three-Year Action Plan on Medical Insurance for Poverty Alleviation Purposes (2018-2020) (the "Plan").
The Plan sets goals of enabling all impoverished population in rural areas to be entitled to the basic medical insurance, serious disease insurance and medical assistance, significantly enhancing the level of medical insurance benefits, and increasing the effectiveness of the basic medical insurance scheme, by the year 2020. Accordingly, the Plan outlines key measures in five aspects, including "improving the sustainable fundraising policy to ensure the availability of medical insurance to all impoverished people as much as possible", "taking integrated safeguards to raise the level of medical insurance benefits offered to impoverished population", "employing proper technologies to boost the fairness and accessibility of medical care services", "optimizing grassroots public services to promote the direct settlement of medical expenses in all aspects" and "strengthening management of medical care services to curb the unreasonable growth in medical expenses". According to the Plan, efforts will be stepped up to increase the payment of medical expenses for serious disease from the medical insurance fund. Specifically, the payment threshold will be halved and the proportion of medical expenses that could be reimbursed will rise by five percentage points, for people stuck in financial troubles, including rural impoverished population, and the upper bound of the reimbursed amount will be increased gradually and cancelled eventually.