(Yicai) July 17 -- Eastern Anhui province and northern Hebei province have become the latest Chinese provincial-level regions to include assisted reproductive services into their medical insurance schemes, as part of the nation’s drive to counter a dwindling population.

Eight fertility treatments, including egg retrieval and in vitro fertilization, will be covered by Anhui province’s medical insurance scheme starting Aug. 1. This is expected to reduce medical expenses for infertile couples by around CNY200 million (USD27.5 million) a year, the National Healthcare Security Administration said on July 16.

Hebei province, which lies next to the capital Beijing, has also recently said that it will include some assisted reproductive services in its basic medical insurance and the work injury insurance fund.

Beijing was the first city to include fertility treatments in its medical insurance scheme in July last year. There are now 14 provincial-level regions across the country that offer this benefit, including Anhui and Hebei provinces. They are Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Shanghai, as well as Gansu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Shandong, Qinghai, Jiangsu and Jilin provinces. There are also other provinces, such as Guangdong, that are actively considering following suit.

Covering fertility treatments in medical insurance will help infertile couples have children by reducing their financial burden as the cost of such treatments is high and is an important way of building a pro-birth society, Jin Niu, a graduate advisor at the School of Public Finance and Administration of Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, told Yicai.

Since assisted reproductive services started to be included in the Guangxi medical insurance scheme last November, the number of people seeking fertility treatments has increased dramatically. As of the end of May, visits to assisted reproductive centers in the region had jumped 15 percent year on year to 993,700, according to the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Management Center.

The infertility rate in China climbed to 18 percent in 2020 from 12 percent in 2007, showing a consistent upward trend, according to a survey released by The Lancet in 2021.

Faced with a greying population, China scrapped the one-child policy in 2016 and replaced it with a pro-birth policy in 2021, allowing couples to have up to three children. But this has failed to spur the birthrate and the country’s population has shrunk for the past two years. Last year, the population decreased by 2.08 million people year on year and the birth rate contracted to 6.39 per thousand from 6.77 per thousand.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Kim Taylor