Five groups of people enjoy exemption of Covid-19 testing fees
The Ministry of Health has just issued an official guideline on how to collect SARS-CoV-2 testing fees when more people must undergo tests at medical facilities. Accordingly, the cost of testing for the SARS-CoV-2 virus is covered by the Health Insurance Fund and the state budget.
Under the Ministry’s guideline, the five groups include inpatients, outpatients, officials, medical workers, employees at medical examination and treatment establishments; patients’ relatives taking care of the patients at hospitals, foreigners, and Vietnamese people abroad who return to Vietnam and have completed the prescribed medical isolation period.
The guideline will be applied nationwide, specifying that the health insurance fund and the state budget will pay for the testing fee of the above-mentioned groups at medical facilities.
Specifically, the health insurance fund pays for holders of health insurance cards at medical facilities as per the scope and level of the health insurance coverage. For those who belong to the above groups but do not have health insurance cards, their testing fee will be covered by the state budget.
The maximum price of SARS-CoV-2 virus testing service by RT-PCR technique from oropharyngeal swabs is VND734,000 (around US$32) per sample.
Medical workers, employees at medical examination and treatment establishments carry out a Covid-19 test every seven days. Outpatients who are asked to stay in a hospital by doctors will be tested immediately. Patients who are transferred from a hospital to another must also be tested. Inpatients must undergo tests every seven days.
In case an inpatient in a hospital’s treatment department was detected to have Covid-19, all patients in the department necessarily undergo Covid-19 tests. Inpatient caregivers will be tested once in case that the inpatient stays in the infirmary for less than seven days or three days while caregivers of inpatients staying in the hospital for more than seven days must undergo two tests.
