Southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region is to cover in vitro fertilisation (IVF) under its health insurance scheme, becoming the second region in the country to do so as part of a wider effort to stem a dramatic decline in the national birth rate.
The health department of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region said on Friday it would include IVF and other fertility services in its basic medical insurance from next month.
It would be the second provincial-level department in China, after the capital Beijing, to allocate government funds to reimburse medical bills for fertility services.
Guangxi’s is the latest effort to encourage people to have children, as the annual number of Chinese newborns has fallen by about 40 per cent in the past five years.
Last year, Chinese women gave birth to 9.56 million babies – the lowest total in modern history and the first time the figure has fallen below 10 million. Analysts say births could fall further this year to between 7 million and 8 million, further clouding the country’s demographic outlook.
Depending on their insurance, Guangxi residents could be reimbursed up to 70 per cent of their medical bills for assisted fertility treatments, and each treatment could be reimbursed up to twice.
The procedure, a laboratory-based alternative to traditional methods of conception, can cost up to tens of thousands of yuan and require several attempts before success is achieved.
More provinces are likely to start reimbursing IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies, said independent demographer He Yafu.
“However, the key to increasing the birth rate is to increase young people’s willingness to have children and reduce the cost of childbirth,” He said. “The main reason for the falling birth rate is that young people don’t want to have children, rather than wanting to have children but not being able to conceive.”
The country’s population fell last year for the first time since 1961, shrinking by around 850,000 from a total of 1.41 billion.
A series of pro-natalist measures have been implemented at local and central levels, but experts concede that immediate effects are unlikely, as similar experiences in developed countries have shown.
China’s northeastern province of Liaoning announced earlier this year that it would begin covering fertility services in July, but the plan was delayed and has yet to be implemented.
Beijing now covers a total of 16 assisted reproductive services under the government-backed medical insurance scheme, including IVF, embryo transplants and egg or sperm freezing.
Earlier this year, the National Health Security Administration said it would guide local governments to cover reproductive services in medical care.
At present, however, the policies and medical services are only available to married women. Unmarried women in China are still barred from undergoing these procedures themselves, even at their own expense.
