Monday, April 06, 2009

The Associated Press: China to provide universal health care by 2020

The Associated Press:

"BEIJING (AP) — China announced Monday it will make improved health care services available to all its citizens by 2020, taking aim at a system long derided as creaking and inadequate."


In the early decades after the 1949 founding of the communist state, China's soviet-style centralized public health system was credited with making huge inroads against infectious diseases and providing basic free care to most citizens.

In the 1980s, however, the system was largely dismantled amid economic reforms and a growing taste for privatization. Seeing a doctor became far more expensive and the gap between rural and urban health care began to grow, undercutting attempts to boost rural incomes.

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