Wang Jun’s eyesight is slowly deteriorating from suspected glaucoma, but there is nothing hazy about his view of China’s much-maligned health system.
“It’s really lacking, really inadequate,” said the retired 56-year-old former dairy farm worker, reflecting a view widely held in this country as he awaits treatment in a grubby clinic in northern China.
China this month announced plans to dramatically reform an unpopular healthcare system seen as costly, underfunded and providing shoddy treatment, especially in poor rural regions.
That will come as good news to countless Chinese like Wang, who have watched the deterioration of a system once widely praised for improving the health of millions as social welfare has been scaled back in China’s capitalist rush.
Complaints about inadequate funding and indifferent care seem borne out at the facility Wang visits in this hardscrabble town on the dry grasslands of Inner Mongolia.
Brusque nurses alternately ignore and bark orders at patients, several of whom must stand, due to a lack of chairs, as they wait to see one of the few doctors.
A plastic wash-basin placed on the floor to catch drippings from a water-stained spot in the ceiling has been kicked aside. The resulting small puddle is an accident waiting to happen.
But the rising cost of drugs is the biggest woe, says Wang, who also has problems with rheumatism.
Though the care was often rudimentary, Wang fondly remembers how costs used to be covered by the state-run dairy cooperative a few hours’ drive away where he worked for 22 years before he was laid off.
Since the 1990s Wang’s family, like millions of others, has been forced to squirrel away modest savings for medical emergencies no longer adequately covered under today’s profit-driven, hybrid public-private system.
Wang says his out-of-pocket drug costs have grown five-fold over the past decade.
Not surprisingly, he welcomed the reform plan.
“It is very good. It shows the government cares for the people,” he beamed.
Beijing says the reform will bring “safe, effective, convenient and affordable” health services to each of China’s 1.3 billion people by 2020.
An initial three-year implementation period will see 850 billion yuan (US$124.4 billion) invested in building more than 30,000 new hospitals and clinics, and training nearly 2 million new healthcare workers.
The establishment of a national healthcare system after Communist China’s 1949 founding was widely credited with curbing many endemic diseases and giving vast backward regions their first taste of basic medical care.
But the steady withdrawal of government support left a “perverse system” with hospitals relying on prescribing drugs to raise money, putting economics ahead of quality care, said Hans Troedsson, the WHO’s China representative.
“So you have situations where drugs cause side effects and another drug is prescribed for the side effects and so on,” he said.
China will face a challenge luring sufficient health professionals to vast rural regions, and it remains unclear how poorer areas will come up with their share of funding for the reforms, he said. Only 40 percent of the money will come from the central government.
But for a patient at the Siziwangqi clinic who gave only his surname, Qi, the thought of cheaper and better care someday has already had a therapeutic affect.
“It gives us a very good feeling,” said the man, who suffers from chronic bronchial problems. “We won’t have to worry so much in the future.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not