Research On The Relationship Between Government And Market In Critical Illness Insurance

In2012, Chinese government announced a decision to expand the coverage of thecountry’s healthcare insurance system to include the treatment of critical illnesses for theurban and rural residents, aiming to provide a secondary medical compensation to preventpatients from being reduced to poverty by necessary healthcare costs. Although the basichealthcare insurance system and the new rural cooperative medical care system now havecovered most population of China, when come across critical illness, the medicalexpenditure still seems too heavy for the patients, a large amount of families fall intopoverty because of illnesses.The decision recommended that, government should choose the qualified commercialinsurers to undertake the critical insurance though auction. The local government couldmake the detailed policies about fundraising、reimbursement according to the local actualsituation.In this article, the author positions the new critical illness insurance to be asupplementary medical insurance in China’s multi-level medical security system and triesto define the role of both government and market in this insurance. At last, it comes to theconclusion that the critical illness insurance should be totally provided by the competitivecommercial health insurance company, and the government should focus on providing abetter social medical insurance standard.