Farmers rejoice under new healthcare policy
- By Wang Zhiyong
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E-mail China.org.cn, January 31, 2012
Wang Guiwu, a farmer living in the countryside of China's northern Hebei Province, received a reimbursement to his medical expenses from the local government healthcare agency just before the Spring Festival in late January.
This would have been unimaginable for him years ago.
Wang, 56, lives in a Fengrun rural village. Last October, he suffered a stroke and was hospitalized in the county’s best hospital. He was able to fully recover, but his 12-day stay would cost him 5,000 yuan.
The sum accounts for a quarter of his family’s annual savings. It was still less than the previous time he had been hospitalized by stroke five years ago, with an expense of 8,000 yuan totally from his savings account.
This time, things got a little different.
Since 2009, he joined the new type of rural cooperative medical care system with an annual fee for 60 yuan (US$9). This insurance measure allows him to apply for a 60 percent reimbursement of his medical expenses. And on Jan. 20, he received 3,000 yuan cash back.
"I am very pleased to see this policy really works for me. Staying in hospital for curing disease is not so expensive now thanks to the new medical system," Wang said. "Every year, I just need to spend 60 yuan to join in this healthcare insurance policy."
"Before, it was a common practice for people in our village to try every possibility to avoid seeing doctors in big hospitals, all because of high costs there," he said.
Though hospital expenses have risen by a big margin in recent years, this new healthcare system cut down a big share of people’s medical burden, making seeing doctors much more affordable than before, Wang said.
Wang is one of hundreds of millions of people benefitting from this new type of rural cooperative medical care system.
According to government reports in 2009, a total of 814 million people would be under the healthcare coverage by 2020.
Li Zhixiang, a doctor with the Fengrun Renmin Hospital, said his department has seen a 30 percent patient increase annually since implementation of the new rural medical system began in 2009. Now, patients’ building area has gotten two times bigger with investment from both local and central governments.
For decades, countryside farmers in China had little healthcare coverage because of the "hukou" system, a centuries-old household registration system which categorizes the population into rural and urban residents.
Without an urban hukou permit, farmers were often denied access to subsidized healthcare, housing and education for their children that urbanites were able to enjoy.
By 2008, just 317 million had basic health insurance coverage and only 91 million women had childbirth insurance. This compared to the country’s population of 1.3 billion.
Critics said the lack of healthcare insurance and social security has held back China's economic development and the government's efforts to spur domestic demand, as people tend to clutch their purses for unexpected diseases, layoffs and retirement.
In 2009, the Chinese central government decided to address the problem of the uneven treatment received between urban and rural areas and among various regions.
The government said it will allocate an additional 850 billion yuan in the three years beginning on 2009, including 331.8 billion yuan directly from the central government, to ensure smooth progression in the reform of its healthcare system.
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