Standing Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Tuc has just signed Decision No. 1702/QD-TTg dated September 3, 2026 approving the Project "Strengthening international cooperation on the elderly in the period 2026-2031".
One of the important goals of the Project is to contribute to realizing the goal of 100% of the elderly being covered by health insurance (HI), gradually expanding access to health care services, long-term care and ensuring social security for the elderly.
According to the Project, strengthen international cooperation on the elderly to effectively utilize resources, knowledge, experience, technology and international models to improve domestic capacity, improve policies, and gradually improve the quality of protection and care services and promote the role of the elderly.
In which, ensuring access to health services and expanding health insurance coverage for the elderly is identified as one of the fundamentally meaningful contents.
The project aims to promote at least 5 international cooperation programs, projects or models on the elderly, focusing on areas such as health, long-term care, community care, social security, digital transformation, data and supporting technology.
Notably, cooperation activities are expected to contribute to realizing the goal of 100% of the elderly being covered by health insurance, while gradually expanding access to health care services, long-term care and elderly social security suitable to Vietnamese conditions.
With the goal of 100% of the elderly being covered by health insurance, health insurance policy continues to affirm its role as one of the important pillars ensuring social security.
This is a practical orientation in the context of Vietnam entering a period of population aging. As life expectancy increases, the demand for medical examination and treatment, management and treatment of chronic diseases, rehabilitation as well as long-term care for the elderly is increasing.
Therefore, ensuring that the elderly have health insurance cards not only contributes to reducing the burden of medical examination and treatment costs but also creates a foundation for the elderly to have more regular access to health care services.
Data development and digital transformation are expected to support policy making, improve governance capacity and help the elderly access services more conveniently and safely.
This is also a direction suitable for the digital transformation process of the social insurance industry, contributing to facilitating participants in accessing, using and enjoying health insurance policies.
The goal of 100% of elderly people being covered by health insurance clearly reflects the orientation of putting people at the center of social security policies, and at the same time shows the role of health insurance in adapting to the aging population process.
Not only aiming to have health insurance cards, the requirement is also to ensure that the elderly are truly able to access and enjoy appropriate, quality, convenient and safe health care services.
Therefore, expanding health insurance coverage needs to be implemented simultaneously with improving the quality of medical examination and treatment, developing a network for elderly care and strengthening the capacity of the medical team.
