A new charity project promises to ensure more children in poor rural areas can have commercial health insurance free of charge.

The project, introduced in Beijing on Wednesday, will offer a maximum payment of 200,000 yuan ($31,400) to children in selected places who have severe diseases.

"We worked hard last year to prevent hunger (among rural children)," said Deng Fei, an initiator of the project. "This year, we thought we should do something to help sick children."

Deng, a director of the journalism department at the magazine Phoenix Weekly, worked with his friends in the media business last year to initiate a campaign called "Free Lunch for Children".

Deng said he recognized that children in rural places have a need for more medical care when, visiting a Guizhou province primary school as part of the free-lunch project, he met a girl who had tuberculosis. She would probably die, a teacher there told him, because her family could not pay to have her treated.

Many households in China's rural areas are in similar circumstances, he said.

Of the children in rural places who died of various diseases in 2005, more than half had not receive medical treatment or had received insufficient treatment for their conditions, said a proposal submitted in 2011 to the National People's Congress, citing Ministry of Health statistics.

It also estimated that the mortality rate among children in rural places who contract severe diseases is 54 percent. That is nine times higher than the rate among urban children.

The project, which is affiliated with China Charities Aid Foundation for Children, will be used to raise money to buy health insurance for children in State-level poverty-stricken counties, said Zhang Qingfeng, spokesman for the charitable project.

The project received 400,000 yuan in donations during its opening ceremony, which was held on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a project was tested out in Hefeng county in Central China's Hubei province in July. It led to the purchase of health insurance from the New China Life Insurance Co for more than 22,000 children who were born in the county from 1996 to 2006. The cost to the project of insuring one child for a year was 75 yuan.

Yang Anwen, Party chief in Hefeng, told China Daily on Wednesday that this sort of commercial insurance will complement the county's existing rural cooperative medical cooperative system.

"The program can only provide a maximum payment of 80,000 yuan to a sick child," he said. "That's far from being enough. In reality, about 300,000 yuan needs to be spent to cure many children who have severe diseases."

He also noted that the official system excludes those with many types of severe diseases from being covered.

hedan@chinadaily.com.cn