Viewpoint: The influx of private capital into the "live water" of medical reform

People's medical care is difficult and expensive, mainly due to insufficient supply of quality medical service resources. Since the implementation of medical reform in 2009, China's investment in health care has increased significantly. However, with the economic and social development, the people's demand for health is also continuously released. The growing demand for medical care is borne by public hospitals. It is unrealistic and impossible. Therefore, it is imperative to open up the fields where social forces can do their jobs and play a market role. For those cities with good basic conditions and developed regions, priority should be given to exerting their social strength and using market leverage for allocation.

Social capital runs medical treatment and is seen as a "living water" to deepen medical reform. This means that the government will devote more energy to public health, disease prevention and other fields, while general medical care will be borne by social capital to increase efficiency. Introducing social capital to organize medical institutions and accelerating the establishment of a modern hospital management system can improve the ability of medical services, help make up areas and regions where the government can not do well or can not do so, and form a diversified medical pattern with complementary advantages to hospitals and investors. The situation of the government, the people, and the win-win situation.

From a global perspective, non-profit hospitals are an inevitable outcome of a country's development to a certain stage, and also a window to reflect the level of a country's medical public welfare. The "12th Five-Year Plan" medical reform proposes that in 2015, the number of beds and services of non-public medical institutions will reach about 20% of the total. With the announcement of the implementation of the "New 36 Article" implementation rules for private investment, the medical service industry is gradually liberalizing restrictions on social capital, and the environment for social capital to run medical services is improving.

China has minimized the obstacles to the operation of social capital from the policy level, and the "relaxation effect" of private capital entering the medical field gradually emerged. In December 2010, the State Council’s “Opinions on Further Encouraging and Guiding Social Capital to Organize Medical Institutions” was published, further liberalizing the access threshold for social capital for medical treatment. More than 10 provinces including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Hebei have issued provincial-level supporting documents, giving priority to socially-run medical institutions.

As of the end of 2011, the number of private medical institutions nationwide was 457,000, accounting for 47.9% of the total number of medical institutions in the country. The number of beds in the country accounted for 9.7% of the total number of the country. The size of private hospitals is generally small, with only 12% of private hospitals having more than 100 beds, and private hospitals at grades two and above only account for 5.6% of the total. At present, the scale, quality, and speed of China's social medical work are still far from the "12th five-year plan" for medical reform, and it is still impossible to form effective competition for public hospitals.

To guide the society to run a doctor, we must conscientiously implement reasonable arrangements for the medical market. Regional health planning should be well done to increase the efficiency of the allocation of medical resources, prevent the unfair expansion of public hospitals from squeezing the development space of private hospitals, and allow more powerful markets, mature conditions, and stable earnings to give way to social forces. A social monitoring mechanism should be established to incorporate medical quality and patient satisfaction into the daily supervision of non-public medical institutions. The role of medical insurance should also be encouraged and restrained, and non-public medical institutions should be encouraged to improve service quality and reduce service costs.

The most important precondition for standardizing social capital for medical treatment is to raise the threshold and allow those who truly have charitable, charitable, and medical skills to come in, effectively alleviating the ordinary people's medical problems.