China has made significant progress toward universal health coverage that meets the reasonable expectations of the population and addresses the perennial patient complaint of “kan bing nan, kan bing gui” (getting healthcare is difficult and expensive). Yet many challenges remain. The recently announced 13th 5-year-plan for deepening health system reform issued by the PRC State Council acknowledges that reforms have entered a difficult “high water phase,” with goals that include establishing effective referral systems and expanding family doctor contracting systems to promote trustworthy first-contact care in the community rather than at crowded hospital outpatient departments. This talk will summarize developments in China’s health reforms since the turn of the 21st century, including recent empirical evidence on the impact of expansion of social health insurance on healthcare utilization and survival, and remaining challenges in areas such as public hospital reforms, moving away from fee-for-service payment, and strengthening primary care.

About the speaker:

Karen Eggleston is a faculty member at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, and the director of the center’s Asia Health Policy Program. She is also a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/PCOR), and a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Her research focuses on comparative healthcare systems and health reform in Asia, especially China; government and market roles in the health sector; payment incentives; healthcare productivity; and the economics of the demographic transition. Eggleston teaches through Stanford’s East Asian studies program and is also affiliated with Stanford’s public policy program.

Eggleston earned her PhD in public policy from Harvard University in 1999. She was a consultant to the World Bank on their project on health service delivery in rural China in 2004, and to China’s Ministry of Finance and the Asian Development Bank from 2010 to 2011 for an evaluation of China’s health reforms. She is a member of the Research Advisory Group for the Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies.