State Council Helps Women Employees Receive Maternity Insura
The General Office of the State Council on February 4, 2017, issued a pilot plan for merging with basic health insurance for workers.
A senior official with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS), and who was responsible for implementing the plan, said merging maternity insurance with health insurance will not reduce the insurance benefits provided to women workers.
You Jun, Vice-Minister of , said merging the two types of insurance will help ease women's misgivings about giving birth. It will also help promote China's two-child policy, You said.
China plans to finetune its social insurance system by integrating the maternity insurance, intended for women during pregnancy and childbirth, with the medical insurance, as they have a lot in common – they share the same designated medical institutes, drug lists, treatment items as well as information platforms, the Legal Evening News reported, citing Yin Weimin, minister of Human Resources and Social Security.
The move is the country's latest attempt to make its social security system fairer and more sustainable, Yin noted.
Such a combination will allow one who participates in the basic medical insurance program to enjoy the benefits of the maternity insurance. The latter, therefore, will cover a larger population. In addition, governments will be able to increase efficiency and cut costs of running the social insurance system.
12 cities are singled out to pilot the program: Handan in north China's Hebei Province, Jinzhong in north China's Shanxi Province, Shenyang in northeast China's Liaoning Province, Taizhou in east China's Jiangsu Province, Hefei in east China's Anhui Province, Weihai in east China's Shandong Province, Zhengzhou in central China's Henan Province, Yueyang in central China's Hunan Province, Zhuhai in south China's Guangdong Province, southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, Neijiang in southwest China's Sichuan Province and Kunming in southwest China's Yunnan Province, the resolution showed.
China's social security system consists of basic pension insurance, basic medical insurance, unemployment insurance, work-related injury insurance and maternity insurance.
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