Health insurance in Vietnam

Vietnamese social security provides two types of health insurance:

• Compulsory health insurance applies to all workers on permanent contracts or contracts of more than three months’ duration.
  It is also aimed at some twenty other categories of insured, with the aim of making it universal. They include: children, the poor, schoolchildren, students, people over 90, war veterans…
• Voluntary health insurance applies to people who are not covered by the compulsory health insurance scheme. For example, the self-employed and informal workers.

Although 80% of the population is covered today, coverage remains limited. Today, it finances only a quarter of beneficiaries’ healthcare expenses.

Contributing to health insurance in Vietnam

Membership is free for children under 6.

For the rest of the population, the contribution is 4.5% of remuneration. Generally covered by 3% employer contribution and 1.5% employee contribution.

If you are an expatriate employed in Vietnam, you are also required to contribute to compulsory health insurance. But as we saw earlier, this only covers a quarter of your medical expenses. It is therefore advisable to take out additional Vietnam health insurance.

Public and private hospitals in Vietnam

The number of hospitals is insufficient for the density of the Vietnamese population. Public hospital occupancy rates can reach up to 250% of capacity. These overloads are compounded by obsolete equipment, and sometimes by a lack of training and experience among caregivers.

It should also be noted that the distribution of care centers is very uneven between urban and rural areas. This considerably slows down care for people living in rural areas.

We generally recommend private hospitals and clinics that meet international standards. But their costs are higher than those of the public sector, which is why it’s important to take out supplementary health insurance.