China s Cooperative Medical System - 1722 Words

As a developing country, maintaining an affordable healthcare system that is available to all of its citizens is crucial for its eventual success. Countless different countries have struggled to devise a way to provide health insurance to their citizens, and China is no exception. Ever since the collapse of China’s Cooperative Medical System in the 1980’s, rural citizens have struggled immensely to obtain affordable healthcare. This paper intends to examine Chinese healthcare reform from 2000 to 2005, mainly focusing on the New Rural Cooperative Medical System as well as the background of China’s healthcare system and how it reached this point. China has had a complex history, especially when talking about healthcare reform in regards to†¦show more content†¦Although the actual quality of health care providers is still under scrutiny, there is no question that the reformed policy has succeeded in providing expansive health benefits to the less fortunate in China. Before we delve into the various aspects of the New Rural Cooperative Medical System, it is important to establish a comprehensive understanding of the original Cooperative Medical System and why it collapsed in the 1980’s. The original system made its first appearance in China in the 1950’s and covered the majority of the agricultural population. â€Å"During the Anti-Japanese War, Medical Cooperatives were setup in the Shanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region, which was one of the bases of the communist party. At that time, the purpose was to meet the basic medical needs of the population by collecting financial contributions from individuals to setup medical clinics. Although the number of such organizations was small, and the mechanism of Medical Cooperatives was not like that of today’s CMS, the Medical Cooperatives of that time are described as the rudiment of CMS† (1, 503). One of the leading reasons that the CMS was successful at this time was the fact t hat it was organized as a community effort with collective funding paving the way for treatment. Under this system, rural Chinese citizens did not have to pay many out of pocket expenses because their respective