Research On Citizens’ Health Right And Its Institutional Guarantee

Human development is the essence as well as the goal of social development. Health refers to a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Health is not only the core of human dignity, but also the core element for human rights. The right to health is not the right to be healthy off one’s body, but the government providing conditions to enable all to be as healthy as possible. Under the concept of "care for people", people’s health is not merely a method for economic development, but the goal for social development. As a member of human society, people are born with right to health. Health right is the basic and fundamental right for human’s survival and development, and also the right to fulfill human’s basic and lowest needs. Health right is a fundamental civil rights, which are generally regarded a set of legal protections in the context of constitution system, wherein such system right subjects’important position is made clear. Government is the basic subject responsible for guaranteeing health right. The citizens and the nation are basic subjects in the constitution relationship, and their relationship is the basic and core political relationship in Constitutional society. As an important basic human right, health right shall be valued and guaranteed by government. The realization of health right is not inherent, on one hand, citizens themselves shall take responsibility for their own health; on the other hand governmental obligation shall be highly stressed. Health right is a general right, whose content and range are affected and restricted by social, economic, political, technological and cultural elements.Right to health originates from the social and economic policy for reducing risk of diseases and other damaging in western countries, which was admitted by the WHO charter in1946and later was reflected in many international and regional human right documents. In1980’s and1990’s, the concept of human right appeared in the discourse system of Chinese party and government. In2004,"respecting and protecting human right" was written in Chinese constitution. In April2009, China issued the new health care reform plan including of "caring for people, putting people’s health right and interests first". However, the practice of guaranteeing citizens’ health right experienced a circuitous process. Since People’s Republic of China was established60years ago, the practice in the two30years had received opposite comments. Before the reform and opening up policy, under the circumstance of low economic development level, China created the Chinese Model of "win the greatest health interests with the least input", which enjoyed high praise from international society. In1978, China began the largest economic system reform in human history. Health care reform in China has switched toward the road of marketization and commercialization."Managing health care undertakings by economic means", and "departments of health shall act in accordance with economic laws" became guiding ideology for medical reform. After many reforms in over30years,"the reform of medical and health care system in China on the whole is not successful" though there are some achievements. The guiding philosophy and values for China medical and health care system reform have changed a lot from the period of adhering to commercialization-oriented, market-oriented to maintaining every citizen’s health right. Taking citizens’health rights as the value goal for new medical reform in China has a profound theoretical and practical significance to the practice of building a basic medical care system covering urban and rural residents and improving the national health policy.Health right is a request for a series of social arrangements, standards, regulations, law and enabling environment safeguarding the right. Combining such research techniques as comparative analysis, historical analysis and case analysis, this paper clarifies the whole realization process of health right from its connotation, features and standard. It states briefly that health equality is an essential requirement; governmental responsibility shall play a leading role; medical security, service system and health human resource are its foundation with legal system and institutional system as its guarantee, all of which construct the whole content framework of health right of citizens.Health equality is an essential requirement of health right. As the most important ethical principle, justice is a primary task for modern social institutional improvement. The realization of social justice shall be guaranteed by a fair system. In social field, system justice includes the fair arrangement of economic, political, legal and medical-sanitary systems. As for its content, it contains substantial equality and procedure equality. Health equality stresses on health equality to everyone so that it can play its biggest health potential. The realization of health equality is a continuous process made up of health services equality in finance, supply and utilization. Inequity of any part may become a key influencing element for health equity. Equal rights among related social subjects in the medical and health resource allocation are the basic foundation to maintain or promote health equity.The government shall play a leading role to guarantee human health right. Due to its specialization, health care service market is bothered with market failure and government failure. Usually market pays more attention to efficiency while government to equity, especially when market cannot arrange resource and profits equally, government must takes equity as priority. Nowadays, more and more people believe that health is the basic rights for everyone, and it’s closely related to social equity and social justice, In the new around of medical-sanitary system reform, government shall play a leading role in guaranteeing people’s health rights, providing equal medical services, rectifying government failure and intensifying its responsibility in safeguarding people’s health rights. Government shall make full use of market mechanism to realize the equalization of public health resource and basic medical care service.To complete the basic medical insurance system is one of the measures to guarantee human health right. Basic medical insurance system is a system provided by government to the entire people. Though China has achieved a lot in the construction of medical insurance system, there are some problems. Firstly, the responsibility of departments is diversely distributed, resulting in a low macroscopic efficiency. Secondly, the financing is not successful, so that individual burden is heavy and there is a large urban-rural gap. Thirdly, localized management makes it difficult to link up medical insurance relationship. Fourthly, our management is still extensive and lack of supervision. In the light of national future development and current conditions, China will break the urban-rural structure and identity restriction, search for the basic medical insurance management system of urban-rural integration and develop multilevel medical insurance by basic medical insurance as its main body, supplementary insurance and commercial insurance as its complement and make it change from sickness insurance to health security. To achieve the utmost profit of basic medical insurance, regulation and expense control toward medical security demander and medical service supplier shall be intensified; the usage of basic medical insurance fund reserve shall be restricted and a scientific and efficient cost sharing and restriction mechanism shall be established. The step-by-step transition from medical security to health security will benefit people’s living quality, improve people’s living environment, change their life style and boost national health conditions.We shall strengthen medical and health service system and enlarge the coverage of medical and health service. At present, there are mainly five problems in our medical and health service system. Firstly, the insufficient medical service supply lags behind the overall economic and social development. Secondly, urban-rural medical and health resource allocation are unbalanced. Thirdly, human resource ability and quality in community-based level are on the low side, which will affect the service quality and function. Fourthly, the orientation between medical technical capacity and medical service ability is not on the same stage. Lastly, there are still many problems in public hospitals reform. New medical reform must perfect the construction of urban-rural medical and health service system and establish general medical practitioner cultivation system, taking community-based medical health service system as the "watchman" for people’s health. We shall complete the interior and exterior management system and operating mechanism and accelerate the reform speed; public hospitals shall rearrange their external governance structure, and perfect their management system, input system, compensation mechanism and supervision mechanism, complete the corporate governance structure in public hospitals, speedup personnel assignment system reform by delimiting formation, post and responsibility, full employment, taking up a job through competition and performance assessment.In this way, public hospitals can run and develop in a sound way with public welfare character.We shall enhance higher medical education reform and boost medical undertaking by cultivating medical human resource.In China, medical education system and health care system are two departments of mutual interdependence and close cooperation. At present, the medical education cannot satisfy the requirement of health care system for health care human resource. Our higher medical education reform shall be people’s health-oriented and we should establish a regulation mechanism efficiently linking up scale and structure of the medical talent cultivation and required health care capacity. We shall reform the medical schools and establish general medical schools, enhance medical students’humanistic quality and professional spirit education, perfect higher medical talents cultivation, focus on improving their quality, aim to educate medical talents with noble medical ethics, sophisticated medical skills, efficient humane accomplishment, strong sense of social responsibility, good practical ability and spirit of innovation. We will search for a new way to cultivate medical talents with Chinese characteristics and make connotative development and historical leap in medical education.Legal system and institution are powerful guarantee for realizing people’s health right. We have formed the social basis for health right protection and aim to build national health system based on civil health right security, complete the regulations of health right in our Constitution, and promote the Medical Treatment and Public Health Law, strengthen the connection and coordination between health rights security and other human rights and intensify individual responsibility for health rights security.