Medical assistance is a institutional arrangement that plays a supporting role in China's medical security system, used to ensure that medical assistance recipients receive basic medical and health services. The reporter recently learned from the National Medical Insurance Administration that since the pilot projects of national medical insurance and medical assistance were launched in rural and urban areas in 2003 and 2005 respectively, after 20 years of development, the national medical insurance and medical assistance system has gradually improved, covering a wider range of people, with stronger protection capabilities, more accurate identification of disadvantaged groups, and more efficient implementation of assistance. In the past 20 years, the scale of assistance has increased. The medical assistance targets of the national medical insurance have extended from the initial recipients of subsistence allowances and extremely impoverished individuals to eligible major illness patients (those who have become impoverished or seriously ill due to illness) in families on the edge of subsistence allowances, monitoring targets for preventing poverty and returning to poverty, and families with rigid expenditure difficulties. The total number of rescues increased from 9.69 million in 2005 to 250 million in 2023, an increase of about 25 times. Especially since 2018, according to the central deployment, medical assistance has included registered impoverished individuals and monitoring targets for poverty prevention and return into the scope of protection. The number of assistance has increased from 91 million in 2017 to 250 million, nearly doubling in six years. The level of assistance has increased. In the process of improving the national medical insurance and medical assistance system, the assistance standards have been classified and refined based on the degree of difficulty of the recipient's family. At present, most regions have cancelled the minimum payment line for subsistence allowance recipients and extremely impoverished individuals, increased the proportion of assistance and the ceiling line, and further improved the level of assistance. From 2005 to 2023, the expenditure on medical assistance funds increased from 1.38 billion yuan to 74.5 billion yuan, an increase of more than 50 times, far exceeding the number of people receiving assistance. The scope of assistance has expanded. Over the past 20 years, medical assistance has gradually shifted towards patients with serious and chronic diseases, shifting from separate inpatient and outpatient projects and separate management of funds to shared use of funds. At the same time, the medical insurance department has stronger service capabilities in medical assistance. At present, the medical insurance department has established a warning and monitoring mechanism for patients with high medical expenses, actively improving the quality of medical assistance services, and striving to discover disadvantaged groups one day earlier and implement assistance benefits earlier. (Lai Xin She)