A customer in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, uses her medical insurance card to buy medication.
Patients with medical insurance in Shanghai’s Jiading District, as well as Kunshan and Taicang in neighboring Jiangsu Province, can now purchase medicines from designated pharmacies in the three areas using their medical insurance cards — a latest joint effort by authorities to provide more convenient medical services to residents in the region.
Previously, a Kunshan patient could only pay for drugs in Jiading or Taicang pharmacies with cash, not his or her medical insurance card, and vice versa.
“The new initiative has made medicine purchasing easier for those living or working in bordering areas like Anting in Jiading and Huaqiao in Kunshan,” said Lu Jing, a representative from Kunshan’s medical insurance fund management center.
“People from Jiading who use their medical insurance cards to buy medicines here made about 17,000 purchases in the first month of the trial.”
Currently, the plan covers over 1,103 designated pharmacies in Kunshan, 350 in Taicang and over 150 in Jiading.
Jiading, as the western gateway to Shanghai and a node in the Yangtze River Delta region, has very tight links with Kunshan and Taicang, with many people communicating daily around the region.