# National Health Insurance Administration (Taiwan)

Source: https://onco.cc/institutions/nhia-taiwan/  
OnCo record `nhia-taiwan` (Institution). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

The single payer of Taiwan's compulsory National Health Insurance, in force since 1 March 1995. Patients with a catastrophic illness certificate for cancer pay no co-payment for that cancer, and since 2025 a separate fund pays temporarily for cancer medicines the main budget cannot yet afford.

## Summary

The National Health Insurance Act, in force from 1 March 1995, makes health insurance compulsory and social. Patients normally pay 20% of outpatient costs (30% to 50% at hospitals visited without a referral) and 5% to 30% of inpatient costs, depending on the ward and the length of stay, but Article 48 exempts people with a catastrophic illness (重大傷病) from these co-payments. Cancer needing active or long-term treatment is one such illness. Certificates for cancer were permanent when the scheme began; since 2002 they last five years and are renewed if the cancer still needs active or long-term treatment, as the administration explained in December 2013. At the end of 2013, 923,396 people held a catastrophic illness certificate, and cancer accounted for 482,949 of the 986,287 certificates in force (49.0%).

Medicines are listed through a joint committee of the insurer, experts, the insured, employers and providers under Article 41, with patient groups able to give their view, and the insurer may commission a health technology assessment under Article 42; the Center for Drug Evaluation writes those assessments. In 2023 the administration started temporary payment for medicines given accelerated approval and, from January 2024, parallel submission, letting a company apply for reimbursement while the TFDA is still reviewing its licence. From 1 January 2025 NT$5 billion of public budget was put into the insurance fund for a temporary payment fund for new cancer medicines, under rules published on 25 February 2025. Next-generation sequencing for cancer has been reimbursed since May 2024: by February 2026, 62 hospitals had claimed for it and the administration counted 5,700 people who had benefited.

nhi.gov.tw answered OnCo's requests with a Cloudflare challenge on 4 November 2026; this record is written from the law and from the administration's statements published on mohw.gov.tw. The coordinates are a Taipei centroid.

## Fields

- Kind: Institution
- Last checked: 2026-11-04
- Also known as: 衛生福利部中央健康保險署; 健保署; NHIA Taiwan; Bureau of National Health Insurance
- City: Taipei, TW
- Type: government
- Website: https://www.nhi.gov.tw

## Sources

- National Health Insurance Act, Articles 41 to 48 (Ministry of Justice law database, Chinese): https://law.moj.gov.tw/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode=L0060001
- NHIA on renewing cancer catastrophic illness certificates, 25 December 2013 (Chinese): https://www.mohw.gov.tw/cp-16-22701-1.html
- NHIA: catastrophic illness statistics for 2013, 8 July 2014 (Chinese): https://www.mohw.gov.tw/cp-16-21777-1.html
- NHIA: cancer medicine temporary payment fund and the NICE workshop, 28 May 2025 (Chinese): https://www.mohw.gov.tw/cp-16-82614-1.html
- NHIA: immunotherapy reimbursement widened, 24 April 2025 (Chinese): https://www.mohw.gov.tw/cp-16-82268-1.html
- NHIA: faster listing of new medicines, 4 December 2023 (Chinese): https://www.mohw.gov.tw/cp-16-76843-1.html
- NHIA: NGS reimbursement results, 14 May 2026 (Chinese): https://www.mohw.gov.tw/cp-16-86349-1.html
- National Health Insurance Administration (Cloudflare challenge to automated requests): https://www.nhi.gov.tw

## Connected records

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- institutions: [Center for Drug Evaluation, Taiwan](https://onco.cc/institutions/cde-taiwan/), [Health Promotion Administration, Ministry of Health and Welfare (Taiwan)](https://onco.cc/institutions/hpa-taiwan/), [Taiwan Food and Drug Administration](https://onco.cc/institutions/tfda-taiwan/)
- terms: [Genomic profiling](https://onco.cc/terms/genomic-profiling/), [Health technology assessment (HTA), reimbursement and QALYs](https://onco.cc/terms/hta/)

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