The Development Of China's Commercial Health Insurance

Commercial medical insurance is a type of health insurance sold by commercial insurance company which provides benefit to pay for the treatment of an insured's illness and injuries. There are many bases to develop commercial medical insurance in China. Since insurance business was resumed from 1980, the gross insurance premium income of China has increased from 460 millions yuan of 1980 year to 160,983 million yuan of 2000 year, but the commercial medical insurance didn't grow up with the other types of insurance synchronously. On contrary, in 1999, the percentage of medical insurance premium income in the whole life and health insurance was 4.36 percent, with a number of 3,860 million yuan, but in 2000, it was not up but down to 2.92 percent, with a number of 2,962 million yuan, and is only 1/29 of the life insurance and 2/7 of the casualty insurance. Medical insurance has the smallest share in the whole life and health insurance and is dropped behind dramatically.The numbers above show that in China, the commercial medical insurance market is very small now and that, it has not been accepted as a necessity and the public still need to know and accept it further. But in fact, the status of demand to commercial medical insurance is very good. The result of an investigation made by China Consumer Association toward 3008 samples of six big cities in November and December of 2000 shows that, more than 51 percent of people believe that they should buy some commercial medical insurance except for the planned medial insurance, which means that commercial medical insurance has wide development potential and its future is very bright.. Then, what's the reason of commercial medical insurance's dropping behind of the other types of insurance? How can we develop the commercial medical insurance market? This article is designed to find the methods to develop China's commercial medical insurance market by analyzing the existing condition of it and the factors of limiting it.This article is divided into five parts. Part one describes the four bases or reasons to produce commercial medical insurance in China, considers that thenatural base is the existing of disease, the social base is the deficiency of the planned medical insurance, the economic base is the highly expensive medical expense, and the systematic base is the national policy to form a multi-level medical security system. Part two introduces the size of premium income and policies in China's current commercial medical insurance market, makes a conclusion that commercial medical insurance is dropped behind dramatically. Part three analyzes factors of limiting the development of commercial medical insurance market, including demand factor, supply factor and policy factor. Part four makes out some methods to develop the commercial medical insurance. The final part analyzes the trend of commercial medical insurance market after China's entering into WTO.