A Study On The Investment For China's Rural Public Health

Since the reform and opening up, China has the rapid economic growth and increasing national strength, we began to increase from meeting the basic needs to the quality of life and went into the new economic and social development stage. But in the process of system transition, the stagnation of rural public health development has hindered the economic development and social advancement. China has entered a new stage of development which main objective is to improve the quality of life, rural public health is the basic conditions to improve the quality of the national, to speed up economic growth, and it is also one of the main objectives for solving problems facing agriculture, rural areas and farmers, and promoting a harmonious social development. To solve the problem of difficulty and expensive cost of medical treatment in rural areas, and meet the growing health investment needs of farmers, in recent years, the new rural cooperative medical care has been widely carried out, national health financial input has continued to increase. In the same time of increase in total health resources, rational allocation of resources which is the fairness and efficiency is particularly important. In the process of public health investment in rural areas, we need more cost control and priority allocation of limited health care resources.Public health investment is under the guidance of certain outlook on development, people in different periods have different health values. The study first reviewed the concept of development evolve from object-oriented to people-oriented, and made out that health was not only a tool for development, but also the direct content of people's comprehensive development. People-oriented health perspective advocates that health has the intrinsic value, is an important practical ability, the key indicator to measure social development or well-being. On base of reviewing the development of public health measurement method, the study proposed the health related social welfare function and health development index.According to the three development stages of early years of new China, transition period and new rural cooperative medical care, the dissertation reviewed the history of China's investment in rural public health. Using life expectancy as a health measure, by way of cost-effectiveness analysis, examined the health performance of provincial financial health inputs during the transition period. We found:increasing the scale of the financial investment of medical and health, could improve public health welfare which had the important practical significance. But the affects government health expenditure on health showed strong regional differences. Health care funds should be invested in areas with relatively high health performance, to promote the effectiveness of health investment to improve public health. Since 2003, the new rural cooperative medical care has been widely carried out. Using health related social welfare function, changes in health-related social welfare of urban and rural residents in China were investigated. We found:although the health welfare of residents had an increasing trend in recent years, but not stable; in some chronic diseases, there are certain social welfare loss. Public health development should not only concern with the total health quantity, but more attention should be paid to health equity among the different groups. Then, the dissertation designed the health development index to assess the current situation on the health development of China's rural residents.In response to the above problems, the dissertation applied theory of public goods, externality, adverse selection and moral hazard under information asymmetry, analyzed specifically the current situation and mechanism of market failure in the process of public health investment in rural, taking the following as example respectively, inadequate investment in public health, competitive pattern in hospital market, externality of pharmaceutical care, and the new rural cooperative medical care. The dissertation made use of public choice theory to analyze the government failure in rural public health investment. The research also analyzed the cause of current problems in our rural health investment from the microscopic angle. We first made the empirical studies on the influence which disease put on rural residents' home income. Making use of models of polynomial distributed lag, we separately inspected the relations between the healthcare expenditure with the per capita income, the per capita productive assets at the end of this year, the per capita wage income and the education level. And then, we carried out random sample investigations in partial rural areas, to analyze qualitatively and representative case dissection the rural resident's health investment behavior.Referring to the experiences and the lessons of overseas rural public health investment for references, this dissertation proposed some ponders and suggestions for our country's rural public health investment under the people-oriented development angle. Including:Establishes people-oriented health perspective, sets up the correct public health investment idea; Residents undertake public health responsibility together with the government.