Editorials

Health for all

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-02-21 07:35

The steps taken by the central government to widen health insurance coverage and increase the benefits people get from it will help disadvantaged residents from this year.

According to the new policy, the government has increased its subsidy for individual health insurance from 120 yuan ($18.25) for urban residents and 80 yuan for rural residents to 200 yuan for all.

The insurance payment for hospitalized patients both in urban and rural areas will increase to 70 percent, 10 percent more than last year.

By the end of this year, healthcare insurance will cover 440 million urban residents, more than 90 percent of the total. Efforts will be made to extend insurance cover to workers whose factories have gone bankrupt or are in financial difficulty.

The State Council has said top local government officials will be directly responsible for healthcare reform. Proper implementation of the reform will be one of the factors the central government will consider while evaluating their overall performance.

This means local governments' success or failure in implementing healthcare reform will determine the fate of their leaders. Besides, failure to implement the reform would deprive local governments of central government subsidy.

The message is: The central government is determined to reduce the expensive healthcare bills and provide everyone adequate access to healthcare service. It is apparent that easier and cheaper healthcare service will improve the living standards of poor residents.

Some poor families have lost everything to pay the medical bills of a family member who has contracted a serious disease and has been hospitalized. To avoid total penury, some families choose not to go to a doctor at all.

The government's steps, hopefully, will reduce the medical expenses of ordinary families considerably.

Notably, one of the main tasks of this year's healthcare reform is to launch pilot programs and exempt, on a trial basis at first, people suffering from chronic or serious diseases from paying too high a medical bill.

To a certain extent, universal health insurance, which would make it easier and cheaper for everyone to get medical treatment, is one way of realizing social fairness and relatively fair distribution of social wealth.

With the gap between the haves and have-nots widening further, it is obligatory both for the central and local governments to better use the taxes they collect for the benefit of the people, especially the have-nots.

The central government needs to pay enough attention to the reform of public hospitals and supervision of private hospitals so that the increased insurance payment is not offset by an increase in medical bills.

(China Daily 02/21/2011 page8)