Want China Times, Xinhua 2014-06-05
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A
children's hospital in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province. (File photo/CNS)
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China's
planned healthcare reforms will be beneficial for the whole of the country's
economy, Daniel McFadden, presidential Professor of Health Economics and Policy
at the University of Southern California, said in a recent interview.
"I
know about the efforts to reform the Chinese system. It is a very ambitious and
very difficult program that they have undertaken," said McFadden, who
received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing methods and theory
used in analyzing how consumers and households make choices from sets of
discrete alternatives.
The Chinese
State Council has recently issued a guideline to boost healthcare reforms this
year, which puts forward 31 tasks in six fields to deepen the reforms and
expedite the building of a universal healthcare system.
In
McFadden's view, the reforms would work very well in the cities, while will be
a much more difficult challenge to accomplish in some of the rural areas.
"But I
believe they would be very good for the citizens of China and also for the
economy as a whole," said the U.S. professor, who was in Italy to
participate in the Trento Economics Festival which closed earlier this week.
McFadden
noted that over the past years, due to a fairly weak system of social
insurance, individual savings rates were extremely high in China.
One of the
results of this trend, he added, was that "China had been growing
primarily by exporting than through domestic consumption, which was a very
successful strategy in the past but is not a strategy that can be continued
indefinitely."
Therefore,
he said, "it is important for China to have a vast consumer sector in
which citizens spend most of the money they earn on goods rather than saving to
have them for the health costs in the future."
The Nobel
Economics Prize Winner praised China's economic success which he defined as
"remarkable."
The opening
up in China, he said, "has been a great success."
"But I
would hesitate to free up the health sector so quickly. I think that is one of
the sectors in the economy where the public control actually makes sense,"
he pointed out.
"Looking
at the healthcare systems around the world, the ones that are most efficient in
terms of keeping people healthy and less costly are the ones where the
community medical providers are either employed by the government or employed
by companies that are largely contracting to the government and not operating
as separate businesses," McFadden elaborated.
"Do
not copy the United States, that is a very inefficient healthcare system,"
he underlined.
The
professor noted that in most countries the healthcare system accounts for
around 10% of the gross domestic product (GDP).
"In
the United States it is 17%, very expensive, while there are some countries
including China which need to put more of the national income into
health," he explained to Xinhua.
However,
McFadden stressed, the benchmark should not be how much a country spends on
health but how healthy it keeps the population and how truly concerned its
doctors are about the health of their patients.
By these
standards, he said, "China still has a ways to go" but has started a
reform process which has already led the country to "doing a lot better
than it used to."
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