Increasing insurance protection efforts and improving the fairness of health care services: A-nalysis on the convergence mechanism between New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme and Healthcare Financial Assistance Program / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

The goal of China's health care insurance system is to improve the fairness and accessibility of health care services for low-income people. In the past 10 years of practice, the insurance has made remarkable a-chievements and gained popularity among broad masses of people. With the support of World Bank and UK Depart-ment for International Development, China Rural Health Development Project ( hereinafter referred as Health XI Project) have used the advantages of unique funding, management and human resources to launched a series of pro-ject activities, with the main goal of achieving effective convergence between the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NRCMS) and Healthcare Financial Assistance Program (HCFAP) in order to explore the assistance system of catastrophic diseases. Some areas have achieved seamless convergence between NRCMS and HCFAP to explore the assis-tance program for catastrophic diseases in the context of confirming and optimizing the management of services covered by the project, especially conducting a series of exploration and practice activities in the aspects of increasing new funding channels to establish theCatastrophic Disease Assistance Fund, strengthening the related supporting regulations, etc. The results show that the utilization of services covered by HCFAP in the project has significantly improved, the protection level of health insurance has greatly improved, and the people satisfaction has significantly increased.