According to Dr. Nguyen Duc Hoa - Deputy Director of Vietnam Social Insurance, policies and laws on health insurance are currently being increasingly improved, the goal of achieving universal health insurance has been approached.
In 2024 alone, the health insurance fund has paid for medical examination and treatment costs for over 184 million people, with a total health insurance expenditure of over 140,000 billion VND.
In many cases, patients with serious illnesses and long-term treatment have costs of up to hundreds of millions of VND, even billions of VND, but people with health insurance cards only have to pay very little, or the health insurance fund will pay the entire cost of medical examination and treatment according to the correct benefit level.
In particular, in the context of increasing health costs, timely and accurate payment by the health insurance fund becomes more important than ever. The Health Insurance Fund not only contributes to timely financial support for patients, but also creates conditions for medical facilities to operate stably, with conditions to improve service quality.
For example, a patient born in 2019 (old Hai Duong province) was paid the highest amount in 2024 by the health insurance fund of more than 4.4 billion VND after being diagnosed with the main disease of "Hemorrhage, diabetes, kidney failure".
"With the cost of participating in health insurance of less than 1 million VND/year, the cost of medical examination and treatment paid by the health insurance fund not only helps patients feel secure in long-term treatment, access to special medicines and modern medical techniques, improve treatment effectiveness; but also contributes to helping patients and their families reduce financial burden, reduce the risk of falling into "deficiency" due to treatment" - Dr. Dinh Duc Hoa said.
Currently, the list of drugs funded by the health insurance fund basically meets the medical examination and treatment needs of patients with more than 1,000 active ingredients, new drug products and hundreds of traditional medicine and herbal medicine.
Among them, there are many cancer drugs, rare diseases drugs, non-cksaturated blood disease drugs, diverse cardiovascular drugs... patients are prescribed long-term use, some drugs are used for life for the treatment of the disease.
In the context of increasingly high prices for medical services (especially treatment costs for chronic diseases, serious diseases, ...), the role of health insurance policies is becoming more and more practical and important for participants.
"Therefore, we always hope that people will proactively and actively participate and maintain health insurance cards continuously, so that when they are unfortunately sick or ill, there will be a health insurance fund to accompany and share difficulties" - the representative of Vietnam Social Insurance emphasized.
