When will the medical insurance card be used nationwide? It's still uncertain.
The general problem of medical insurance card has not been realized for the following reasons:
First of all, medical insurance involves urban and rural planning, regional planning and information construction, and there are regional differences in the payment amount, payment method and proportion of medical insurance and medical insurance catalogue. At the same time, in order to prevent fraudulent insurance and abuse of medical services and supervise medical behavior, the authenticity of medical service information should be audited in medical insurance settlement. Real-time settlement of medical treatment in different places needs to change the manual audit of medical treatment information in different places into electronic audit. This requires the networking of thousands of institutions and tens of thousands of medical institutions across the country to realize the standardization and unification of information. Therefore, the national popularization of medical insurance card is a huge systematic project, which takes a long time.
Secondly, if we want to realize the national standardized medical insurance system, we need to do it in stages, first at the prefecture level, then at the provincial level, and finally realize the national transfer and universal medical insurance.
Thirdly, China currently implements three different insurance systems: basic medical insurance for urban workers, basic medical insurance for urban residents and new rural cooperative medical care. There are overlaps and differences among the three basic medical insurance systems, so it is difficult to manage them in a unified way. Even the inter-provincial real-time settlement in the Yangtze River Delta Economic Zone is only for the insured of basic medical insurance for urban workers. The unified management of medical insurance is very important if it is coordinated and transferred nationwide.
In the case that the medical insurance card is not popular in China, all parts of the country have also explored the settlement of medical expenses in different places. At present, most provinces and cities in China have achieved prefecture-level overall planning, and a few places have achieved provincial overall planning, achieving cross-district and inter-provincial medical insurance settlement. For example, Chongqing has realized the whole city's networking, and the insured people can settle medical treatment and purchase medicines in real time with their cards throughout the city. Some provinces and cities in the Yangtze River Delta Economic Zone, as well as other provinces and cities, have signed agreements to realize inter-provincial cooperation in real-time settlement of medical expenses.