[EQ] The Chinese Health Care System: Structure, Problems and Challenges

The Chinese Health Care System: Structure, Problems and Challenges

 

Jens Leth Hougaard, Lars Peter Østerdal and Yi Yu

Department of Economics - University of Copenhagen - January 2008

 

Available online PDF [34p.] at: http://www.econ.ku.dk/Research/Publications/pink/2008/0801.pdf

 

“…In the present paper we describe the structure of the Chinese health care system and sketch its future development. We analyse issues of provider incentives and the actual burden sharing between government, enterprises and people. We further aim to identify a number of current problems and link these to a discussion of future challenges in the form of an aging population, increased privatization and increased inequity…”

 

“…..In the late 80ies the Chinese government launched a major reform of the social insurance system, including reforms of pension- and health care schemes. This reform has had a huge impact on the organization of the entire public welfare system. It has been implemented using a series of local experiments, of which particular models have been selected for national implementation. The system is constantly changing trying to respond to current financial problems and adapt to the need of the population.

Despite many efforts, the general impression of the population as well as the governing authorities is that the reform has not been successful.1 Cost inflation has been difficult to control and the huge inequality in access seems to be further increased. On top of this, the reform process itself has made the population confused and uncertain about their rights in the system and when adding that the lack of regulation makes the system more exposed to corruption this distrust only becomes worse.

China is a country with huge regional differences. It is therefore questionable whether it makes sense to talk about one coherent system or whether one should more likely consider the system as several co-exiting subsystems – subsystems that seem to be related to different groups of people as well as differences in geographic location. Moreover, any empirical analysis of the Chinese health care system will suffer from considerable data uncertainties and often even a crucial lack of relevant data…..”

 

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