Nanshan Life Insurance today released the "2026 Sustainable Health White Paper". (Provided by Nanshan Life Insurance)
[Reporter Wu Xinting/Taipei Report] Nanshan Life Insurance today released the "2026 Sustainable Health White Paper." More than 40% of the respondents believed that medical and long-term care reserves should be at least 6 million yuan, and 18.3% even believed that it should exceed 10 million yuan. On average, they believed that 6.82 million yuan of medical and long-term care funds needed to be prepared.
According to the top 10 causes of death in the country announced by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, chronic diseases caused by the three high-risk diseases, namely heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, diabetes, hypertensive disease, nephritis and renal disease, have taken away more than 100,000 people every year for two consecutive years starting from 2024. More than 60,000 Chinese people have died, more than the number of deaths caused by cancer. In the past 10 years, chronic diseases related to the three highs have killed more than 570,000 Chinese. In 2024, the number of points paid by the health insurance for the three high-related diseases will be close to 170 billion points.
The "Health Promotion Statistical Annual Report" released by the National Health Service in 2025 also revealed that the prevalence rates of hypertension, hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia among Chinese people over the age of 18 have increased to 30%, 13% and 31%, setting new highs. The government will start promoting the "Metabolic Syndrome Prevention and Treatment Plan" in 2022. Targeting the three highs and two evils (excessive waist circumference and insufficient good cholesterol), if more than three of the five risk factors are present, you are suffering from metabolic syndrome.
Yin Chongyao, Chairman of Nanshan Life Insurance Company, believes that “working to treat the disease before it occurs” means that we should find out the causes of metabolic syndrome in Chinese people in advance and try our best to maintain a healthy metabolism, so as to avoid chronic diseases or major diseases. Through interviews, research analysis and questionnaires, Nanshan Life Insurance and ITRI learned about how major countries are responding to the increasing prevalence of metabolic syndrome and how to reduce government finance and medical expenditures by improving national metabolic problems.
The questionnaire also investigated the three major diseases that Chinese people are most worried about. 64.15% of the respondents were worried about cancer, ranking first, followed by dementia, accounting for 55.31%, and cardiovascular disease, accounting for 55.05%. The ranking was the same as in the 2025 survey.
Good health requires the support of worry-free financial health. More than 40% of the total respondents believe that medical and long-term care reserves must be at least 6 million yuan, and 18.3% even believe that it must exceed 10 million yuan. On average, they believe that medical and long-term care funds need to be prepared at 6.82 million yuan. 39.3% of the respondents have prepared more than 3 million yuan, but only 5.9% have prepared more than 10 million yuan. The overall average preparation is 3.37 million yuan, which means there is still a gap of 3.45 million yuan.
Among the respondents who have started to prepare medical and long-term care reserves, 70.3% use insurance planning, 49% use stock fund investment, and 35.3% use bank deposits; however, 11.8% have not started preparing at all.
In the "2026 Sustainable Health White Paper", experts and scholars also put forward suggestions for financial health: For example, to manage your "financial life" as early as possible, you can use methods such as regular fixed amounts of forced savings to gradually build up your asset base; the average Chinese person has an unhealthy life expectancy of 8 to 9 years. If your finances permit, you can consider preparing A long-term care fund of 10 million yuan should cost at least 30,000 yuan per month to estimate the cost of care. Third, the insurance plan should first use term insurance as a base, and then extend the protection with lifelong insurance, benefiting yourself first and then others. Fourth, it is recommended that the critical illness protection be increased to 1 million yuan to cope with the out-of-pocket portion of new medical treatments and new drugs.
