Beijing on Monday issued a city-customized supplementary health insurance program tailored for people who already have basic public medical insurance to further relieve locals' medical expenditure burden, particularly from severe diseases like cancer.

The special medical insurance required each applicant to pay 195 yuan ($30) a year, with the maximum sum insured of up to 3 million yuan, said Ma Jiye, director of the Beijing Municipal Medical Insurance Bureau. Compared with the basic health insurance plan, 25 domestically-made special drugs and 75 overseas special drugs are covered in the new program.

Jointly released by five major Chinese insurance companies and overseen by local authorities, the medical insurance is the first of its kind in Beijing.

Zheng Bingwen, director of the World Social Security Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the latest medical insurance is a component of the country's medical insurance system with Chinese characteristics, which is also an important supplement to the inclusive mechanism.

"In 2020, the city-customized commercial medical insurances in China saw a sudden blowout. Over 100 cities in more than a dozen provinces launched similar policies," said Zheng, adding that the number of insured people surpassed 53 million by June this year.

He said the newly-launched medical insurance part unbuckled the "bottleneck" that national medical insurance programs faced with and raised the bar of insurance coverage ratio.

The medical insurance will be effective from Jan 1 to Dec 31, 2022.