Word: ruralization
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...country, meanwhile setting aside $250 million to fight the disease. But it's unclear if those measures will be enough to stem the outbreak in outlying provinces, where the health-care system has been eroded by years of inadequate government funding, and where medicines are largely unaffordable to rural residents who each earn an average of $300 a year. Total medical spending for the 48 million people in the impoverished southern province of Guangxi, for instance, is just half that of Beijing's, with a population of 13 million. "Rural health care is the blister on China's medical system...
...from 35 to 65 between 1949 to the mid-1970s. But in the early 1980s, the mainland began shifting from communism to capitalism, and peasants had to dig into their own tattered pockets to pay for health care. At the same time, cash-strapped local governments cut subsidies to rural hospitals and clinics, essentially privatizing them. "Healthworkers started trying to maximize revenue instead of thinking things like, 'How many kids can I immunize this year?'" says Lisa Lee, a medical officer for the WHO in Beijing...
...City dwellers remain better-off, mostly because six in 10 of them have some form of health insurance. Only 10% of rural residents do, and most of them are government employees or live in wealthy coastal areas, where many work in factories. More emblematic are people like Shi Yangxin. The 30-year-old peasant started coughing blood in December but tried to tough it out to save the cost of a hospital visit. He was diagnosed three weeks ago with tuberculosis. He sold his chickens and ducks to buy $20 worth of medicine. At his pine-board house...
...inability to stem tuberculosis cases like Shi's bodes ill for its SARS struggle. Like SARS, TB is a contagious respiratory disease whose spread can be contained through vigilant monitoring of its victims. Though TB has been all but eliminated in developed countries, it still afflicts 1.5 million mostly rural Chinese each year, an infection rate second only to India's. The World Bank recently concluded a decade-long project providing free TB treatment in 13 mainland provinces. It was a stunning success?incidence of the disease fell by 36%. But provincial governments ultimately treated the project as charity. They...
...Beijing has tried to keep health-care costs in check in rural localities by capping the price of many procedures. For example, pumping the stomach of someone attempting suicide by eating fertilizer?a practice not infrequent among women in farming villages?costs $1. But governmental price controls mean local clinics have to raise funding by other means. Most adopt the strategy seen in the village of Nanzhao in Hebei. There, the local clinic contains a wooden desk, several threadbare chairs and a bookshelf lined with antibiotics, steroids and painkillers. In most countries, such potent medications can only be dispensed...