If tilting State finance in favor of the needy is what China needs to do in the near future to strive for common prosperity and social harmony, increasing the input in healthcare services for rural residents is definitely the right thing to do.

The Ministry of Health announced on Wednesday that the yearly input in the personal account of new rural cooperative medical insurance will increase from 290 yuan ($46) in 2012 to 340 yuan on average this year, of which the government will pay 280 yuan and individuals the remaining 60 yuan. Even more encouraging is the medical bills for 20 types of serious diseases, including lung cancer and stomach cancer, will be reimbursed by the scheme.

If fully implemented, the scheme will pay for 70 percent of the treatment costs for such diseases, of the remaining costs, the serious disease insurance will cover 50 percent and the civil medical assistance fund another 15 percent, which means rural sufferers of such diseases will pay just 10 percent of their treatment costs.

Such a healthcare cost compensation scheme was piloted in one-third of the country's rural areas last year. All villagers, who have joined the cooperative will benefit from the program this year.

Such a scheme provides important healthcare security to rural residents, since the new rural cooperative healthcare program covers about 812 million villagers, or 98 percent of the rural population.

Before this it was not unusual for a rural family to go bankrupt when one of the family contracted a serious illness. This policy will prevent the burden of paying for treatment from adding to families suffering and thereafter relieve them of such worries.

In the country's most populous province, Henan, the total amount of money the healthcare scheme has compensated rural villagers for their healthcare spending reached 22.357 billion yuan last year, and 334 villagers enjoyed the ceiling compensation of 150,000 yuan. The money reimbursed for hospitalized villagers accounted for more than 53 percent of their bills. This percentage will hopefully increase to 55 percent this year nationwide.

How to increase the income of rural villagers and improve their living standards is of importance to the country's efforts to tackle the growing wealth polarization. If its finances allow, the government has every reason to do more for rural villagers as it will never realize its goal of building a comparatively better-off society without improving the lives of its rural residents.

(China Daily 01/18/2013 page8)