With the development of its economy, Tianjin attaches great importance to ensuring and improving people’s life, gives top priority to ensuring the rights and interests of disadvantaged groups in social security and practices overall planning of urban and rural social security system. It is improving the construction of the system to solidly bolster the building of a harmonious society. According to the statistics of the year 2008, the population of pension coverage had reached 3.76 million; the population of medical insurance 3.97 million; the population of unemployment insurance 2.31 million; the population of work-injury insurance 2.68 million; the population of fertility insurance 1.96 million. These five insurance funds total at 61.7 billion yuan, with a year-on-year increase of 25.2 percent.
While it is attaching great importance to the construction of social security regulations and service systems, the Tianjin Municipal Government is also adhering to the people-oriented principle, planning and pushing ahead urban and rural social security system in a holistic and coordinated way. Two regulations started to take effect in 2008, including urban residents’ fundamental medical insurance system and Temporary Solutions to Rural Residents’ Social Pension Coverage. The two systems will cover 45 percent of city’s residents, totaling at 4.45 million. The city, therefore, turns out to be a pioneer in terms of establishing basic medical insurance and social pension coverage system for rural and urban citizens.
The Tianjin Municipal Government pays special attention to tackling the problems in people’s life when it is pushing ahead the wide-coverage, basic, multi-layer and sustainable social insurance system. It directs the security polices to benefiting disadvantaged groups through government subsidies. In 2008, the Tianjin Municipal Government endorsed and put into practice Proposals on Further Improving the Social Insurance System of the City, making a comprehensive plan of the social insurance system aiming to cover urban and rural workers, residents and all other social groups, extending the coverage of pension, medical, unemployment, work-injury and fertility insurance to rural enterprise staff to better secure their interests.
Tianjin’s urban staff medical insurance system took effect in 2001 and at present, the overall urban and rural medical insurance system has been set up with security platforms, such as combining of individuals’ accounts and society’s planning as a whole, medical cost social pool for major diseases and medical assistance. A multi-layer, wide-coverage and basic system has come into shape. Since 2005, Tianjin has taken the lead in practicing the system that connects unemployment insurance to urban subsistence allowance and re-employment. It is stipulated that people on subsistence allowance or the unemployed who have found a job by themselves will get six-month subsistence allowance and the unemployment insurance compensation for the remaining time period of the duration of validity of the insurance, respectively, and that people who were on unemployment insurance and have started their own business will receive employment subsidies. The population on unemployment insurance in Tianjin has dropped from the previous 120,000 to the recent 30,000.
When it began to bring into effect the work-injury insurance system, the Tianjin Municipal Government has covered the senior injured workers ever since the founding of the country. In order to meet the urgent demand of migrant rural workers, the city established a work-injury insurance policy to give the worker the priority to take part in the insurance system in 2004. In 2008, it linked work-injury benefits including lump-sum compensation for death in work, medical subsidy for work-injury and living and care allowance to the average salary of the society, timely improving work-injury compensation amount.
At the end of 2007, the Tianjin Municipal Government innovatively carried out the policy of covering 260,000 migrant construction workers by calculating the insurance amount based on the total construction cost amount. In 2008, Tianjin again took the lead by flexibly covering workers from service industries of business and trading, food and accommodation by linking the insurance amount to the size of the business, which will directly benefit 400,000 workers in the service industry.
In the spirit of sharing development achievement with all the retired and providing universal benefits for the whole society, the Tianjin Municipal Government has spared no effort in improving the social security situation, with 60 percent of the new accessible financial resource employed in the construction of local social security system. Retired people receive an ever-increasing pension. There is an average increase of 325 yuan per capita by 42.5 percent in the past three years, 70 yuan higher than the national average.
