Regulating private medical institutions: a case study of China

The expansion of privatisation in health care has been discussed extensively in most European countries and remains a hot topic nowadays. In China, privatisation results in considerable changes in its health care system, especially accelerating the ever-growing private medical institutions (PMIs). The rapid growth of PMIs raises the question of regulation for the Chinese government. Given the fact that few studies are available on the regulation of PMIs in China, I attempted to fill that gap by discussing the development of PMIs with a special focus on legal–regulatory strategies. After assessing current legal–regulatory strategies concerning PMIs, the paper identifies three major concerns regarding effective legal rules (i.e. weak coherence, inconsistency and legislative vacancy) and three difficult issues regarding government capacity (i.e. the negative effects of decentralised political structure, the low professionalism of bureaucrats and lack of reliability) that impede the well-functioning of regulatory agencies in China. As a plausible response, the paper recommends that the newly drafted basic health law should assign a separate chapter to regulate PMIs and also an independent regulatory body should be established to manage the issues of PMIs in China. Detailed recommendations are the practical implications of ICESCR General Comment No. 14.