China's New Healthcare Could Cover Millions More

Source: Time

China is laying out plans to dramatically reform its health care system by expanding coverage for hundreds of millions of farmers, migrant workers and city residents. To fix a system plagued by rising costs and diminishing access, the country is moving away from the market reforms introduced in the 1980s and returning to a more socialist health care system.

The World Bank announced this week that while China's growing economy had lifted a half billion people out of poverty from 1981 to 2004, medical costs remained one of the top financial threats to low-income rural residents. With that burden in mind, Beijing has said it will spend $125 billion over the next three years building thousands of clinics and hospitals and expanding basic health care coverage to 90% of the population. "This commitment to improve equitable access to essential health care for all in China is quite important," says Sarah Barber, a China-based World Health Organization expert on health policy.
China has faced health care problems for years, but the economic crisis has increased the need for reforms. The lack of an adequate safety net forces Chinese to bank huge sums to cover treatment costs. By building a sounder health care system — with more hospitals and clinics and broader medical coverage — Beijing hopes it can convince consumers to spend more of their savings and boost economic growth.

A key aspect to controlling medical expenses is managing the price of drugs. The government has announced it will set price controls on medicines deemed to be essential, likely based on a list of 300 to 400 drugs recommended by the World Health Organization, the state-run Xinhua news service reported. Since market reforms were introduced in the 1980s, hospitals began relying on advanced procedures and drug sales to make money. Individual spending on pharmaceuticals rose as a result, and experts argue that profits sometimes drive what doctors prescribe. "When drugs take up 50% of health expenditures — two times more than other countries — there is a real problem with cost, access and appropriate use of drugs which is often driven by the profits gained from over-prescription," says Dr. Lincoln Chen, president of the China Medical Board, a U.S.-based foundation that promotes health care in Asia.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1890306,00.html

Get a clue, Washington DC

they have better trains and subways in some areas, they have a program to get a man on the moon (already have men in space), sending destroyer to fight pirates, etc

manufacturing has the latest plants, infrastructure has the latest...

while we are sitting around having teabag parties, not wanting to fix stuff.

China fought the opium corporations back in the 1800's. China had closed their society to corporate raiders and foreign devils for centuries, but through opium addiction, the English and other European corporations hoped to exploit this new market. Chinese Communism is a direct fallout from this--again freeing the nation from foreign devils. Only recently China made some tentative alliances to allow in corporations, with strict limits, and they got bitten really hard really early by the consequences. They know other ways to structure their society and economy, and they aren't afraid to use them.

Whereas the US was established to throw off the East India Tea corporation and others, but the fight to introduce corporations was constantly chipping away at our resolve to isolate ourselves from central banks, abesentee landlords and soulless stockholders. The battle was lost at the turn of the 20th century, when the Federal Reserve was quasi-illegally established and the monopolists-industrialists finally took hold and started strangling the life out of our nation.

Through world wars and world recessions, these profiteers have just about killed democracy, individuals, and nearly shredded the Constitution through their water boy W. Poppy Bush Senior and friends probably started the drug importation/addiction to break down the US society, just as the opium corporations did in China in the 1830's.

It's truly horrible to contemplate.

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/opiumwars/opiumwars1.html

http://www.akasha.de/~aton/GNNBushHardDrugEmpire.html

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/030607.html

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/lost7.html

Hitler built the worlds first freeways and made the trains all run on time. Nazi Germany built the first long range rockets, did the first real research on putting objects into orbit, built infrastructure to provide transportation to the common man, created the first jet aircraft, and had one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. The Nazi's built beautiful monuments and statiums everywhere. Nobody on DU would want to emulate them though, for glaringly obvious reasons.

Authoritarian governments have the advantage of ruling by fiat. If the leader says something gets built, it just gets built.

You should look into the living conditions of the people who have to work in those subways. While China has embraced the market in the manufacturing areas, it is still very communist when it comes to state run projects. You work when they tell you to work for the wage they are willing to give you, or you go to prison. Strikers get shot.

If you're merely concerned with building things, it's a great way to get things done. Most of us have concerns beyond that.

Can't do that here.

mayyyyybe.

I work at a drudge like job with no voice in determining my future prospects due to an epically bad economy, I go home and am fed an endless stream of corporate controlled news, fed a diet of nationally control food substances which, once again, is corporately controlled. BUT my current health care sucks. So if I got free health care could I put up with china's government insanity of a really low human rights record?

we have a "patriot" act, we torture, we suspend habius corpus, we wiretap, we spy on the citizens, we invade nations for no reason, etc...

So what would be the stretch?

(I'm only being have sarcastic here)

can anyone who doesn't get their paycheck from an insurance company defend the current system we have now?

Chinofascists! I'm glad we're still free.

(To die because of neglected health conditions.)