Asia Trends Monitoring: Changing Incentives in China’s Healthcare System

University of Michigan Law School is hard, and I was right in saying that I wouldn’t have time to write posts for a while during 1L; so it’s nice when someone writes a good post for me, and even better when the post includes me the post is about a topic of great interest to me generally.  In this case, incentives in the Chinese healthcare system -

Changing incentives in China’s healthcare system: more than a cash injection needed

What’s a health system to do with more money but seemingly entrenched perverse incentives? That’s the question that Alex He Jingwei asks in a new paper in East Asia Policy, “China’s healthcare reforms: reversing the perverse incentive scheme“. Alex is a PHD candidate at LKYSPP, and he’s just come back from 7 months fieldwork asking policymakers all about the new rural cooperative medical scheme, so he’s in a good position to elaborate. The paper reviews incentives defects – like massive information asymmetries between patients and providers, in a country where most people head straight to the hospital rather than a primary care physician -  and the implications for health systems performance, before critically analysing the intention and design of new policy reforms. Others have done this (Damjan Denoble at asiahealthcare blog offers some insights) so whats new here?

Asia Trends Monitoring has been mentioned here before: this website is a fantastic, plain and simple.  I’m glad that they don’t write about healthcare more often though…if they did I’d be worried that seven months there would be no point to continue with Asia Healthcare Blog.

Enjoy the article.