China’s health care system and policies

This chapter discusses health care system and health policies in the People’s Republic of China. It begins by summarizing recent reforms and the current situation, and then sets out how health policy is made and implemented, and how medical professionals are educated and trained. It then turns to describing the health care system, focusing on delivery, financing, and resultant inequalities, before setting out the trajectory of system reform over the last 40 years. It concludes by discussing current health care system challenges, unresolved problems, and the prospects for resolving them. It argues that China’s health care system has benefitted from the rapid economic and social development of the last four decades, and in some areas the quality of care can be high. But despite reform efforts since 2009 to tackle problems created by commercialization and underfunding in the 1980s and 1990s, it is still beset by enormous difficulties, most notably unequal access and rising demand from a rapidly ageing population.