A Study On The Causes And Countermeasures Of The Rapid Growth Of Medical Expenditure

The problem of "expensive medical bills and difficult access to quality medical services" has raised wide public concern over the recent years. The people’s desire as well as the government’s requirement is that the less wealthy people could receive affordable and high-quality medical treatment. With the speedy increase of the aged population, the change of information asymmetry and the risk of a double moral standard about patient-doctor, and with the alteration diseases spectrum from the model of biomedicine, the economic burden for the constantly increased medical costs is becoming heavier in China recently. The problem of rapid growth of medical costs remains unresolved, although since the eighties the government has devoted a significant amount of labor, resource and money in the reform of the medical and public health systems. Therefore, in order to reduce the patients1burden and maintain social stability, analyzing the causes of rapid growth of medical costs and searching for the way to end it will hold greater realistic significance.This paper starts with the analysis of the status quo of medical costs, using the methods of time series, comparative analysis and questionnaire survey, and points out a series of problems, such as the soaring hospital costs lead to governmental credit crisis, the illness-caused poverty, the tense doctor-patient relationship, the medical corruption and the discontent among the masses. Then this paper analyzes the reasons caused soaring hospital costs from various aspects, for example, insufficient finance investment, the lack for health care system, information asymmetry, different benefit demands between doctors and enterprises. And on the basis of investigation, this paper makes the following proposals:strengthening the construction of informatization, setting up regional health information platform, increasing financial investment, promoting health service ability, making scientific assessing system, improving the level of performance management, carrying out price reform, cutting off the benefit chain among hospitals, doctors and enterprises, exploring the reform policies about quota prepayment according to diagnosis classification.