The Medical Saving System of Children With Serious Illness—Base on the Case Study of City X in China

Abstract

Medical savings for low income family of children with serious illness is an important issue for all countries. It is required for China to identify an effective medical saving pattern for children with serious illness. The research was undertaken in a city of Guangdong Province in China (it is called 'City X'). Semi-structured interviews and a case study were used in the research. I collected much information from the semi-structured interviews and found that Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau (including Tomorrow Plan Office) offers the list of children with serious illness requiring medical saving, Social Security Department Medical Insurance Division receives the list and offers medical saving fund support and medical security according to the list, these fund support belongs to the government fund support. When the government fund support is not enough, Charity Federation and Chinese Red Cross Foundation will offer additional fund support. China has achieved great improvement on the children with serious illness medical saving institution and system, however two new solutions for collecting more fund for children with serious illness medical saving are still required. The first solution is to issue 'Children with Serious Illness Medical Welfare Lottery'. The winning probability and bonus amount of this welfare lottery can be designed a little higher than the recent welfare lottery and sports lottery to attract more people to purchase. The second solution is to establish 'Extreme Serious Illness Children Medical Welfare Fund'. This fund can be a 'specialized' national fund for 'the children with extreme serious illness', the profit of this fund can be firstly used for the medical saving of 'the children with extreme serious illness without death risk', the bank interest and share these fixed income of this fund can be firstly used for the medical saving of 'the children with extreme serious illness with death risk' because the stability of medical saving fund is crucial to this serious circumstance.