Reforms to Rural Healthcare System Announced at National People's Congress

Premier Wen Jiabao announced the launching of a "Program for Establishing and Developing a Rural Healthcare Service System" in a March 5, 2006, government work report to the annual plenary session of the National People’s Congress (NPC), according to the text of the report posted March 16 on the Guangming Daily Web site. The State Council adopted the plan on March 1, according to a March 2 Xinhua report. An outline of the plan also was published on December 31, 2005, in an Opinion on Promoting the Construction of a New Socialist Countryside.

Premier Wen told the NPC delegates that over the next five years the government will invest more than 20 billion yuan (US $2.5 billion) to modernize hospitals, clinics, and medical equipment at the village, township, and county levels. In an effort to speed up the establishment of rural health cooperatives, Premier Wen pledged that 40 percent of counties in China will have experimental health cooperatives by the end of 2006, and allowances paid to farmers in the program will be doubled from 20 yuan (US $2.5) to 40 yuan (US $5). Wen also said that governments will build rural health cooperatives across the entire country by 2008. Since 2002, the central government has encouraged the formation of rural health cooperatives, which receive local government subsidies and cover the medical expenses of any farmer who can pay a modest annual premium. The poorest residents in rural areas, however, frequently do not enroll in the cooperatives because they cannot afford the required fee, as noted in the Commission's 2005 Annual Report.

Since the collapse of the rural public health infrastructure in the 1980s, a disparity in the quality and cost of healthcare has grown between urban and rural areas. Eighty percent of medical resources are concentrated in cities, and the rural cooperative medical care system covers only 22.5 percent of rural residents, according to a March 3 article in the People’s Daily. Recent research has focused attention on the resulting disparity between urban and rural residents in the infant mortality rate and average adult lifespan, and also has highlighted the financial burden healthcare costs create for rural Chinese citizens. For more information on the challenges facing rural China’s public health system, see Section III(h)- Public Health of the Commission's 2005 Annual Report.