State-owned Hospitals in China to Embrace MarketMore State-owned hospitals in China are to lose their government support and will have to adapt to the market as the country's entire health service undergoes inevitable reform, experts predicted.The unexpected epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndromes (SARS) has made the central government determined to take unprecedented action with regard to the country's public health system, according to Thursday's China Daily. The relevant departments under the State Council, such as the Ministry of Health and the State Development and Reform Commission,are making investment plans with huge budgets to improve the country's public health networks, according to a three-day national working conference on health that ended Wednesday in Beijing. One of the main tasks in the coming years will be further development of the health care system so that it can better prevent and control epidemics such as SARS. The newly added task is expected to bring new change to the system of providing medical treatment, another side of the reform campaign, said Cai Renhua, director of the China National Health Economics Institute. One change to the medical system in China, a developing countrythat still can only allocate limited funds to health care is that the various levels of government should give up their ownership ofand financial support to many state-owned hospitals, Cai said. While encouraging more hospitals to adopt market principles, governments at various levels should also continue to own some high-level general hospitals, infectious disease hospitals, medical academies, and hospitals of traditional Chinese medicines,Cai said. Currently, most of China's hospitals are state-owned and under pressure to make major changes to lower their medicine prices and improve their efficiency and services. |
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