China's New Rural Cooperative Medical Care System

In the beginning of 1990s of 20th centuries, with the establishment of the socialist market economy, promoted the rapid development of rural society and economic structure transformation, the village had gradually changed to a market-oriented society, fast development of industrialization and urbanization , rural income and consumption structure had undergone profound changes, the original rural cooperative medical service was unable to meet the medical needs of peasants, therefore government explored methods of improving China's cooperative medical service.But after entering the 21st century, the rural three-cooperative medical network was still scattered and broken, the low coverage of rural cooperative medical care and expensive medical costs made peasants condition worsen , the phenomenon of returning to poverty because of illness was not improved. In view of this situation, on October 2002, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the"on further strengthening the work of the Rural Health", aimed at establishing a new rural cooperative medical system which could cover all peasants. The new rural cooperative medical care system was a mutual benefit medical system in a basis of big illness, which meant the government should organize, guide and support ,farmers participate in voluntarily, individual, collective and government multilateral financing. The new rural cooperative medical system was a financing mechanism combined of individuals, collective subsidization and the integration of government-funded , individual peasant paid not less than 10 yuan, and local financial assistance was not less than 10 yuan per capita each year. the government had reformed old rural cooperative medical insurance system positively, since the experimental work carried out in 2003, the new rural cooperative medical care had achieved certain results, but the central and local financial subsidies for farmers was low and the rate of peasants paid was still very high, which would bring heavy burden for the patients. The secure level of rural cooperative medical system is still very low and could not solve peasants problems, the rural cooperative medical system needs further improvement.The author of this paper uses the combining method of theoretical and empirical analysis to explore new rural cooperative medical system. This paper is divided into four parts, the first part provides an overview of China's rural health care system development process, analyze the existing problems of rural cooperative medical system ; In the second part through comparing the urban and rural medical insurance system in the allocation of medical resources, funding and management, classification, to establish a fair system of rural health care is very important.In the third part we could learn empirical experience from the rural cooperative medical modes in the developed and developing countries; In the last part we could take some measures to build a fair rural medical security system, government should increase its input and responsibility , introduce competition mechanism, strengthen the supervision on cooperative medical institutions, design cooperative medical model in account of regional economic development differences ,in some areas local government could purchase services from insurance agencies. The collection of social security tax can be used as a necessary measure of expanding rural health-care funding channel, we should take reasonable measures to guarantee mobile rural workers.