Research On The Legal Issue Of Medical Waste Disposal Fee

Ranking the first in national dangerous wastes list, medical waste is seriously harmful, with severe pollution or contamination. Since the SARS epidemic in 2003, it became an urgent task to dispose of medical waste with the principle of healthy environment, risk prevention, safe and harmless, and wastes reduction. Handling medical waste with charge can be conducive to centralized disposal. Besides, it’s an important premise and safeguard for the medical waste disposal’s industrialization. In practice, the high cost of gathering and dealing with medical waste, the different way or standard to charge the fee, both lead to payment arrearage and Leakage, thus, disposal companies’ income can’t be guaranteed from operation of medical waste. How to make it develop sustainably would be a big issue. Industrialization of medical waste would be extremely blocked. In this paper, the author analyzes the legislative overview and charge status in our country, and finds out some critical issues. First, it is not clear that who shall pay the disposal fee and what is the role of the government in it. Second, the calculation of the cost omits some steps. Third, the way and standard of calculating the fee is too complex. On the issue of unclear fee payer, the author proposes the Polluter Pays Principle. It is advised that the hospital and patient should have main responsibility for the fee of proposing medical waste. In addition, the author introduces the Extended Producer Responsibility Principle to support that the producer should bear the disposal fee of the medical waste coming from his products. On consideration of its public nature, the author suggests that the government pay the fee with its emergent ability when there is outbreak of great infectious diseases, accidental natural disasters, or big leakage events of medical waste. On the matter of cost accounting, the author holds that it should be clarified whether the handling cost includes the expense such as daily detection, depreciation of detection devices, packing bags and so on. In the end, the author suggests that the way and standard of charging be unified in the whole country with a clear range of the charging fee and a good balance of both sides’ status.