“对于保险公司来说，我们要扩展业务的困难在于我们需要知道我们潜在客户的位置及其特征，BT版天剑狂刀网页游戏，”总部位于北京的爱心人寿副总经理李驭说。 “在这方面，水滴保险商城为其用户提供了广泛的类别和各种标签，非常清楚。”

自去年底开始与水滴合作的爱心人寿在水滴保险商城上有两种产品——年金产品和儿童重疾保险，后者是基于水滴整个平台大数据的定制产品。

“对于像中国这样的大国，北京人民的健康状况显然不同于广东省。但在传统的保险定价模式中，我们以相同的方式对待它们，” 李驭说，“对于这些具有大流量的网络平台，他们可以利用互联网金融技术，根据健康状况、地区、年龄等将客户划分为更清晰的类别……而每个客户可能拥有数百个标签。”

此外，在线销售的保险产品可以更快地更新，并在一类较大的产品中提供更多样化的保单。

网络互助计划从技术上讲不是保险，因为赔付不是互助平台提供的。今年3月，政府下发《关于深化医疗保障制度改革的意见》，要建立“多层医疗保障体系”，将网络互助也纳入医疗保障制度体系，以支持其发展。

蚂蚁集团的白皮书说，到2025年，中国的网络互助行业预计将达到4.5亿用户，占人口的近三分之一。

“未来，我们希望与合作伙伴携手创造中国的凯撒医疗或者联合健康模式。” 沈鹏说。

沈鹏有更大的抱负，尽管水滴公司将在未来三到五年内继续专注在中国市场，但从长远来看，他希望将这种模式介绍给更多“一带一路”的国家。

Online mutual aid platforms are plugging a health care gap in China for those on lower incomes

China has dozens of online mutual aid platforms, with the three biggest players each having more than 10 million members

The platforms are popular among low- and middle-income households in rural areas, where there is often a lack of quality hospitals and affordable care.

Pay less than US$1 and get up to 100,000 yuan (US$14,144) of help if you face a critical illness – this is how an online health care mutual aid platform helped rural resident Hu Youbin pay medical expenses when he was diagnosed with cancer last year.

In a country with a population of over 1.4 billion and uneven access to quality health care, poverty due to serious illness is a reality that many low and middle-income households like Hu’s have to potentially face.

However, the situation has been improving as Chinese tech giants including e-commerce company Alibaba, search engine Baidu, on-demand delivery company Meituan Dianping, ride-hailing operator Didi Chuxing and smartphone maker Xiaomi now offer more affordable health care plans via mutual aid platforms, which operate as a collective claim-sharing mechanism.

Unlike other crowdfunding platforms where people raise funds for specific projects with certain amounts of money, participants of mutual aid platforms share the cost of a claim only when it has been verified – so a 1,000 yuan claim for medical treatment by a person would end up as a cost of 1 yuan each for a pool of 1,000 people in a mutual aid scheme. Platform operators typically charge a fee to members when collecting for a claim.

“I joined the platform because I wanted to help others. One or two yuan is not big money,” Hu, one of the beneficiaries on Alibaba’s mutual aid platform Xiang Hu Bao, said. “I did not expect that I would benefit [from the service] and I did not want to. But I had no choice when I got ill.”

From China’s Hunan province, 56-year-old Hu was diagnosed with oral cancer last April and had surgery the following month. His family spent about 140,000 yuan on living expenses and medical fees – equal to more than two years of their income. By the time Hu got ill, he had paid 4.79 yuan in total to cover claims from about 2,200 members like him.

Launched in October 2018, Xiang Hu Bao, which literally means “mutual protection”, is now the country’s largest online mutual aid platform, attracting over 100 million users in less than two years. Available within the Alipay app, it provides a basic health plan to protect participants against 100 kinds of critical illnesses.

“This is totally beyond my expectation. I was surprised and even a little bit worried later on whether our service capacity was enough,” Yin Ming, vice-president of Ant Group, the operator of Alipay said, adding that there were over 1 million newly registered users on the launch day of Xiang Hu Bao. Ant Group is an affiliate of Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post.

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.