The Improvement Of Universal Health Insurance System In China In The Context Of New Health Reform

Universal coverage of health care means that every citizen can access equitable, affordable and adequate health care. With the aging population, transition of disease pattern from communicable disease to chronic non-communicable disease, rapid advances in the high-technology and increasing demand of population, health system is facing the challenges of limited health resources and expanding demand of health care. How to develop an efficient health financing system to address these challenges has become an important issue that every country in the world is striving to solve.In the context of rapid economic growth, the Chinese government is trying to develop a people-oriented, sustainable and harmonious society. The issue of health care is closely related to the livelihood of population and needs to be improved urgently. Developing a universal health insurance system is the financing option that can realize the objective of universal coverage of heath care. This study aims to explore how to develop an efficient universal health insurance system under the background of ongoing health reform so as to achieve the objective of universal coverage of health care, which can also provide useful insights and scientific evidence for further reform and policy making.On the basis of background and objectives presented above, this thesis discussed and explored deeply the issue on how to further improve China's universal health insurance system by synthetically using the research method of literature review, historical study, comparative study, empirical study and case study. Finally, using basic principles of health economics, from the perspective of equity and efficiency we proposed relevant policy suggestions and research directions in the future. First, the inequity in the benefits across different schemes should further be reduced so as to improve the equity in health care utilization. Second, the low risk pooling level should further be raised to provincial level and eventually to national level. Third, the current payment system should be transformed from FFS to prospective payment system. Fourth, the infrastructure of primary health care should be further strengthened to gradually establish a two-way referral system. Fifth, the Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance scheme and New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme should be integrated in future to achieve the objective of equity in access to health care between urban and rural population. Sixth, the development of MSAs is questionable and outpatient health care should be gradually covered in the benefit package. Seventh, it is necessary to change from voluntary enrollment to mandatory participation when mature, and finally, how to encourage the purchaser to play a prudent and efficient role needs further research and experiment in the future.