Chinese Medical Expenses. Rapid Rise In The Problem To Study

With the reform and opening-up policy in China, the medical expenditure has been greatly increased, whose speed goes faster than GDP and financial speed in the same term. It is becoming a burden to government, enterprises and individuals. And the soar of the medicine and medical treatment prices prevents more and more people to go to hospital, which becomes a focal point and a hot spot. As a result, there is both a theoretical meaning and a practical significance in researching this problem.This research chooses a county in Shanxi province as a survey spot, which is the writer's hometown. In methodology designing, I adopt the visual angle of health economics and health sociology and use the quantitative and qualitative analysis. This research investigates local residents' behaviors in seeking medical advice and analyzes the factors influencing their behaviors and lays emphasis on the reason that residents' medical expenditure is so expensive. The investigation shows that people's medical spending takes up a large proportion in their total expense spending and they are dissatisfied with it. When the residents suffer from an illness, they are tending to go to doctor because they have no enough money. Furthermore, many families sink into poverty because of illness and others are lost in illness because of poverty.There are many reasons for china's increasing medical expenditure, which is including not only equitable reasons but inequitable ones. Therefore, this research differentiates the reasonable aspects and unreasonable ones of every reason. The reasonable aspects include an aging population, increasing chronic diseases, rising commodity prices and doctors' incomes and so on. Meanwhile, the unreasonable factors include the following ones: government's compensation is not enough which caused the hospitals' marketization; medicine' producing and circulating reform is lagging; medical supervisor is not sufficient and commercial bribery is very furious; traditional social security system has a lot of defects.The expensive medical costs bring out heavy burdens to government, enterprises and residents, which lowers health justice. At the same time, it leads to the disorder in health system and hurt its working efficiency. Consequently, controlling our nation's high health expenditure becomes extraordinarily important.Some suggestions and policy advice are given in the end of paper: underlining government's functions in 'three reforms measures', extending government financial compensations, separating doctors' income from their prescription quantities; reforming hospital's management system, distinguishing the profitable hospital and unprofitable one; keeping watch on medicine's price and large-size medical equipments' use; speeding up the reform of social security system.