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中国网络互助正在填补中国低收入人群的医疗保健缺口( 四 )


Similar to other mutual aid platforms, Xiang Hu Bao now charges an 8 per cent management fee for claims, which is used for verification, payment and transfer fees as well as staff salaries.
Although the company does not rely on Xiang Hu Bao to earn money, the platform promotes Alipay’s insurance business. As of September 2019, premium health policies sold by third party insurance companies on the Ant Insurance Platform have increased more than 60 per cent year on year.
In the past two decades, the Chinese government has set up three health insurance schemes in an attempt to achieve universal health coverage for its citizens. Together, they constitute the foundation for health care financing in China today, covering 95 per cent of the nation’s residents by the end of 2011, according to the World Bank.
However, China still lags behind western countries when it comes to the maturity of the commercial insurance industry and it still faces several challenges to insure the world’s largest population against serious illness.
China has dozens of online mutual aid platforms, with the three biggest players each having more than 10 million members. Apart from Xiang Hu Bao, Waterdrop Mutual and Easy Mutual – both backed by gaming giant Tencent Holdings – had garnered 14 million and 15 million members respectively by the end of March, according to an industry white paper published by Ant Group last month.
Waterdrop was founded in 2016 by Shen Peng, who six years earlier had joined Meituan straight out of university as the start-up’s tenth employee. He rose to be head of Meituan’s core food delivery business but had developed an interest in health insurance since childhood when he was raised in a residential community for staff of the People's Insurance Company of China (PICC).
“In 2015, I was aware that China's insurance industry mainly served middle and higher class families. What China lacked was inclusive insurance to cover blue-collar workers and other middle or low-income groups,” the 33-year-old Shen said. “While internet services are available to so many people, I think using the internet as a way to develop inclusive insurance is a promising and meaningful thing.”
With a total of 310 million premium users across all platforms by the end of last year, Waterdrop now has three major business sectors: online mutual aid platform Waterdrop Mutual, insurance sales platform Waterdrop Insurance Mall and Waterdrop Crowdfunding, where poor people with critical illnesses can post their medical records online and ask for donations. So far, the mutual aid platform has helped more than 10,000 members with over 1.5 billion yuan in medical expenses claimed.
Shen said that while mutual help plans are cost-effective for users, the challenge from a business perspective was to find multiple profit streams to allow rapid growth. “The company has different businesses and we can import traffic among different sectors … we are using profitable businesses to feed these unprofitable businesses,” he said.


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