Healthcare fund reduced COVID costs for public

China's healthcare insurance fund covered COVID-19 vaccine and vaccination expenses worth a total of 150 billion yuan ($21.6 billion) from 2021 to last year, and paid out 4.3 billion yuan for nucleic acid tests in 2022 alone, the National Healthcare Insurance Administration said on Thursday.

Through negotiations with vaccine manufacturers, each dose of COVID-19 vaccine based on inactivated, recombinant protein or adenovirus vector technologies was priced at around 16 yuan.

The price of nucleic acid testing per person was capped at under 16 yuan and the price of batch testing, which combines samples from up to 10 people in a single tube, was no more than five yuan per person.

For mass testing, the price per person was lowered to less than 3.5 yuan, and the price of rapid antigen tests was reduced to under 6 yuan per person, it said.

These efforts "effectively lowered burdens on public and societal costs on epidemic control", the administration said in a report on its work of last year. The administration added that the total balance in the national medical insurance fund was 4.25 trillion yuan at the end of last year, up from 3.61 trillion yuan by the end of the previous year.

Another highlight of last year was the launch of centralized bulk procurement campaigns for 60 types of medications and five types of orthopedic consumables, whose prices have been cut by 48 percent and 84 percent respectively.

wangxiaoyu@chinadaily.com.cn