The national medical insurance and medical assistance system has been gradually improved, and the expenditure on assistance funds has increased by more than 50 times in the past two decades.
This newspaper, Beijing, April 1 (Reporter Sun Xiuyan) Medical assistance is an institutional arrangement that plays a supporting role in my country's medical security system and is used to ensure that medical assistance recipients receive basic medical and health services. Reporters recently learned from the National Medical Insurance Administration: Since the pilots of national medical insurance and medical assistance were launched in rural and urban areas in 2003 and 2005 respectively, after 20 years of development, the national medical insurance and medical assistance system has gradually been improved, covering a wider range of people and providing stronger protection capabilities. People in need can be identified more accurately and relief can be implemented more efficiently.
Over the past 20 years, aid has become larger. The targets of national medical insurance medical assistance have been extended from the initial subsistence allowance recipients and extremely poor people to members of families on the edge of subsistence allowances, objects of anti-poverty monitoring, and eligible serious illness patients (patients with serious illnesses caused by illness) in families with rigid expenditure difficulties. The total number of assistance recipients has increased from 9.69 million in 2005 to 250 million in 2023, an increase of approximately 25 times. Especially since 2018, in accordance with the deployment of the central government, medical assistance has included registered poor people and those monitored for prevention of return to poverty. The number of people assisted has increased from 91 million in 2017 to 250 million, an increase of nearly 2 times in 6 years.
Relief levels are higher. In the process of improving the national medical insurance and medical assistance system, the assistance standards have been classified and refined based on the degree of difficulty of the families being assisted. At present, most areas have canceled the minimum payment line for subsistence allowance recipients and extremely poor people, increased the proportion and ceiling of assistance, and further improved the level of assistance. From 2005 to 2023, medical assistance fund expenditures increased from 1.38 billion yuan to 74.5 billion yuan, an increase of more than 50 times, and the increase was much higher than the number of rescues.
The scope of assistance is wider. Over the past 20 years, medical assistance has gradually been tilted towards patients with serious and chronic diseases. The original inpatient and outpatient projects were separated and the funds were managed separately, and the funds were jointly used. At the same time, the medical insurance department’s service capabilities in medical assistance have become stronger. At present, the medical insurance department has established an early warning and monitoring mechanism for patients with high medical expense burdens, actively improves the quality of medical assistance services, and strives to identify people in need one day earlier and implement assistance benefits earlier.
(People's Daily)