China will soon come out with a whitelist of medical products that can be purchased at retail pharmacies using personal healthcare insurance accounts. This move will regulate the use of employee basic medical insurance personal accounts in a reasonable, prudent, flexible and measured manner.
The proposed whitelist will also prevent the inclusion of unreasonable expenses that fall outside the scope of basic medical coverage.
The notice document for the proposed whitelist was jointly issued by the National Healthcare Security Administration and the Ministry of Finance in May 2026. It mandates that provincial-level healthcare security administrations formulate their respective whitelists by the end of September this year.
The proposed whitelist will include medical products that can be purchased at retail pharmacies using personal healthcare insurance accounts. This will help to crack down on the illicit use of such funds to buy cosmetics, health supplements and other unrelated items.
The whitelist may include drugs, medical devices such as thermometers, blood pressure monitors, blood glucose testers and rehabilitation aids, as well as medical consumables including masks, plasters and pregnancy test strips.
China's basic medical insurance programme for employees covers nearly 389m people nationwide, accounting for about 30% of the total population.
The programme includes personal healthcare accounts that can be used to purchase medicines at designated pharmacies and cover part of outpatient and hospitalisation expenses. However, authorities have found that money in these personal accounts has been used to purchase nonmedical items.
In a recent case, retail pharmacies in Hunan and Henan provinces were found to have settled payments for cosmetics, health supplements and daily necessities by fraudulently recording them as insurance-covered medications.
The whitelist will be a dynamic document and will be adjusted based on public demand and advances in medical technology as and when required. The notice has made it clear that some products currently excluded could be added in the future if their medical functionality becomes primary and their pricing becomes appropriate.