(To watch the full press conference with sign language interpretation, click here.)

Public accident and emergency (A&E) departments will charge patients a fee of $400 per visit starting from January 1, 2026, as part of reforms to fees aimed at enhancing the financial sustainability of the city’s public healthcare system.

Currently, public A&E departments charge a flat rate of $180.

Under the fee revamp, patients in critical and emergency cases will be treated for free at public A&E departments.

At a press conference today, Secretary for Health Prof Lo Chung-mau said the reform was intended to offer more help to the underprivileged and patients with critical or severe illnesses.

He stressed that the extra revenue will go back into public hospital services.

The authorities will also introduce a “co-payment model” to charge patients between $50 and $500 for complicated pathology and non-urgent imaging tests.

Moreover, they propose to cap charges at $10,000 a year for each patient, and to make it easier for those eligible to apply for a fee waiver.

At today’s press conference, Permanent Secretary for Health Thomas Chan elaborated on the various measures.

“I think the first one, on improving the waiver mechanism, we have relaxed the income and asset limits significantly for (patients) to qualify for medical waivers,” he said. “This is targeting the low-income families.

“We expect that low-income families would mostly be able to be covered by the medical waiver mechanism, since we have already raised the eligibility level to (100% of) median monthly domestic household income for families of two and more.

“And for families of one, actually we would be relaxing the income limit to 150% of the median monthly domestic household income. And also for the asset limit, we have significantly raised it to match the level for applying for public rental housing.

“We expect that the number of low-income families or people that potentially qualify to apply for medical waivers would increase from 300,000 to 1.4 million. This is already in addition to the 600,000 CSSA (Comprehensive Social Security Assistance) recipients and also the Old Age Living Allowance recipients aged 75 or above.

“In addition to the medical waivers, we introduced an annual spending cap.

“If the amount of (medical) fees that you need to pay exceeds $10,000 for the whole year, anything in excess of $10,000 will be waived. This is to provide another protection for all Hong Kong citizens who may or may not be eligible to apply for medical waivers.”