Non-state Owned Medical Institutions:Develop Ment And Challenge

In the last30years, a world-wide reform about hospital property system has been spreading through the US, Europe and some Asian countries. It is a reform trend aims to utilize social capital to establish diversified medical institutions. These reforms with the principle of introducing or strengthening the impact of market mechanism in medical care service, have positive effects on enhancing efficiency of health service, compensating deficiency of government funds, displaying advantages of market mechanism, and improving performance of public sectors. The reform is also encouraged and supported by governments and contributes to the promotion of the relationship between public and private partnership. However, it is still a complicated systematic project which is thought to have advantages in eliminating obstacles to co-development of public and private health service by proponents, yet is considered to have disadvantages in expense control and medical fairness by opponents.As the new rounds of China’s health care system reform began, the medical market, with abundant social capital pouring into the health care industry, is becoming more and more open.’Several Opinions on Encouraging and Guiding Healthy Development of Private Investment’,’Notice of Further Encouragement and Guide on non-state owned medical institutions’and a series of documents about new medical reform have made specific provisions of non-state owned medical institutions. As a matter of fact, drawbacks of original simplex state-owned medical system are revealed day by day, such as decifiency in total supply, limited government financial input, few competition among public hospitals and poor efficiency in management and operation. The only way to solve these conflictions is to reform. On one hand, approaches are needed to be explored to mobilize social capital to participate in construction of mecial institutions by government guide. On the other hand, system and mechanism of non-state owned medical institutions are needed to be studied, and tax price, resource allocation and access system demands stronger supervision. These reforms and explorations require further discussion and research.This study suggests that the definition of social capital in non-state owned medical institutions is the sum of material, human and social action capitals except for government capital, comprehensively explains the development status, trend and research focus of non-state owned medical institutions at home and abroad for policy analysis, emphasizes the internal and external environmental factors associated with non-state owned medial institutions, and puts forward strategic thinking and policy suggestions following eight aspects which are values, legal system, market mechanism, political security, medical technology, material capital, human resource and social action. We try to form the elementary frame of studies on non-state owned medical institutions and provide the basis for relative national policy.