Not since the earliest days of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of the iron rice bowl in the 1980s has China faced as great a need for change as the leaders currently face.
Then as now, the government in Beijing recognized a pressing need to reform the means by which social services were provided. But unlike then, today’s reforms must occur in the midst of a society that has already experienced significant economic growth and has already gone through a painful opening of formerly public services to private competition.
For most Chinese, while their economic futures have materially improved since Deng’s painful reforms were enacted, their access to healthcare has actually deteriorated, a point Yanzhong Huang, the Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council of Foreign Relations, has made eloquently in his recent research.
Beijing’s struggle to reform its healthcare system brings political concerns, social issues and business pressures together on a collision course. While the need for government and industry to collaborate on these matters is obvious, whether China’s pressing concerns in this area will allow it to do so remains to be seen.
The ever-present temptation in China, to simply resort to government-mandated policies absent industry’s guidance, is one the country has already given into at a national level relative to clean technology, and at a provincial level through the Anhui pharmaceutical pricing model.
