Economy

Markets

Industries

Insights

Reports

Events

Wen: China's health care reform aims at public interest

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-02-28 16:43

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said in Beijing on Saturday that China will strive to improve the country's health care system to make health care more accessible and affordable.

He made the comment in an online chat with netizens jointly hosted by the official websites of the central government and Xinhua News Agency.

China's State Council, or Cabinet, passed a long awaited medical reform plan last month which promised to spend 850 billion yuan ($123 billion) by 2011 to provide universal medical service to the country's 1.3 billion population.

Wen said the plan covers five aspects:

-- Expand the coverage of medical insurance. Increase the amount of rural and urban population covered by the basic medical insurance system or the new rural cooperative medical system to at least 90 percent by 2011.

-- Build a basic medicine system that includes a catalogue of drugs that mostly needed by the public.

-- Improve medical service systems (especially those at the grassroots level). Build another 5,000 clinics at the township level, 2,000 hospitals at the county level and 2,400 urban community clinics in three years.

-- Gradually provide equal public health services in both rural and urban areas in the country.

-- Start to reform public hospitals.

"Health care reform is not easy. Our determination to push forward the reform shows that the government cares about the health of the public," Wen said.

Wen said the principle of the reform is that public medical service must have public good as its goal.