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Concern over hospital funding
(China Daily)
Updated: 2006-03-07 05:54
Huang Jun, from a provincial hospital in East China's Jiangsu Province, said
hospitals should not take all the blame for the high costs of medicine and
treatments.
Huang, a member of the CPPCC, noted in his proposal to the session that the
high price is also caused by a chaotic medicine production and sales network,
and bad market management.
The price of various medicines by the time they reach hospitals has often
increased 10-fold, he added.
In China, medicines are listed as common goods, so can be freely marketed
instead of being regarded as special products that should be strictly managed
and supervised, said Wang Chunlan, deputy to the NPC from Anhui Province.
Official statistics show China has 6,000 pharmaceutical factories, 12,300
wholesale enterprises, more than 180,000 drug stores, and more than 300,000
medical service institutes.
Drug producers blamed
Some experts have criticized the amount of drug producers in the country.
Many of the factories are small and produce the same medicines.
It had led to a situation where factories have to go to great lengths to sell
their products.
And due to the poor supervision of the State price-fixing department, many
factories set extremely high prices for their products.
Many presidents of hospitals and doctors are given kickbacks or bribes by
pharmaceutical companies, which means the more medicine the hospitals sells, the
more money they can make.
Deputies at the session called on relative departments to give more severe
punishments to people who give or take bribes in the industry.
In the future, State-owned public hospitals should be given enough financial
support and the bulk of their income should not come from medicine sales,
deputies suggested.
And better management and supervision of the medicine market must be carried
out in the future, Gao Qiang said.
Also, Chinese authorities should encourage foreign groups to invest in those
non-State-owned parts of the health service in China, Zhu Qingsheng, a member of
the CPPCC said.
Zhu, a former deputy health minister, said foreign funds could hold up to 70
per cent of a hospital's shares now, a policy which was put in place two years
ago.
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