November 01, 2007
Commercialization of Health Care Responsible for Disparities in China?
From Reuters:
Hong Kong-born Margaret Chan said the cost of health care in China was outstripping income growth and that poor health was a major cause of poverty among China's hundreds of millions of rural residents.
"The payment of providers and fees charged for services has commercialized health care, compelling providers of care to focus on profit rather than the most efficient health services," she told a conference in Beijing.
"Health education and preventive services are neglected. Why? Because these activities do not guarantee income. As a result, simple conditions are often treated at very high cost."
The costs of seeing a doctor or staying in hospital are out of reach for many in the world's fourth-largest economy, and the lack of access combined with corruption has made the issue a source of social unrest.
We blogged before about the effects of privatizing health care in China. However, one quote from the New England Journal of Medicine deserves repeating:
From 1978 to 1999, [China's] central government's share of national health care spending fell from 32 percent to 15 percent. At the same time, the central government transferred much of the responsibility for funding health care services to provincial and local authorities and required them to provide that support through local taxation. That had the immediate effect of favoring wealthy coastal provinces over less wealthy rural provinces and laid the basis for major and growing disparities between investments in urban and rural health care.