China's 2020 vision on universal health

CHINA has inked a blueprint for universal healthcare by 2020, ahead of the US which has struggled with the concept for the past decade.

In a landmark document delivered yesterday, China's Government aims to have basic healthcare for 90 per cent of its 1.3 billion people by 2011.

The policy underscores the aim of China's leaders to push its economy forward by repairing the country's social safety net, which has been fundamentally damaged in the past three decades as thousands of state-owned enterprises have been privatised and regional communes disbanded.

After three years of intense debate and repeated revision, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council, or China's cabinet, jointly endorsed and issued a 13,000-word document called Guidelines on Deepening the Reform of the Health-care System.

According to the plans, by 2020 the world's most populous country will have a basic healthcare system that can provide "safe, effective, convenient and affordable" care for its citizens.

Professor Zhou Zijun at the Public Health Institute of Beijing University told Chinese media on April 5 that 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the Chinese population was not covered by medical insurance, and those covered also needed to pay 30-40 per cent of medical costs.

The move has been described as laudable by the World Health Organisation, and the World Bank said China's commitment to universal access to basic healthcare in its reform plan was encouraging.

After the Communist Party took power in 1949, central governments covered more than 90 per cent of medical expenses for urban residents, while rural people enjoyed simple but essentially free healthcare, a briefing document for the strategy said.

When China began its economic reforms in the early 1980s, the system was dismantled in favour of a market-oriented healthcare system, but this created a growing social gap. With low government funding, doctors at state-run hospitals were forced to "generate" incomes for the hospitals through prescribing profitable, sometimes unnecessary, drugs and treatment. This could account for 90 per cent of a hospital's income. Soaring medical costs became less affordable to ordinary citizens.

Medical care has been a continuing issue for China, with deaths from fake drugs, pharmacy factories bribing authorities to get product licenses and a lack of trust between patients and doctors.