Winnie Yip

Global Surgery 2030: evidence and solutions for achieving health, welfare, and economic development.

Remarkable gains have been made in global health in the past 25 years, but progress has not been uniform. Mortality and morbidity from common conditions needing surgery have grown in the world’s poorest regions, both in real terms and relative to other health gains. At the same time, development of safe, essential, life-saving surgical and anesthesia care in low- and middleincome countries (LMICs) has stagnated or regressed. In the absence of surgical care, case-fatality rates are high for common, easily treatable conditions including appendicitis, hernia, fractures, obstructed labor, congenital anomalies, and breast and cervical cancer. Although the term, low- and middleincome countries (LMICs), has been used throughout the report for brevity, the Commission realizes that tremendous income diversity exists between and within this group of countries. In 2015, many LMICs are facing a multifaceted burden of infectious disease, maternal disease, neonatal disease, noncommunicable diseases, and injuries. Surgical and anesthesia care are essential for the treatment of many of these conditions and represent an integral component of a functional, responsive, and resilient health system. In view of the large projected increase in the incidence of cancer, road traffic injuries, and cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in LMICs, the need for surgical services in these regions will continue to rise substantially from now until 2030. Reduction of death and disability hinges on access to surgical and anesthesiacare,whichshouldbeavailable, affordable,timely,andsafetoensuregood coverage, uptake, and outcomes. Despite a growing need, the develop

Early appraisal of China's huge and complex health-care reforms

Chinas 3 year, CN¥850 billion (US

The Chinese Health System At A Crossroads

125 billion) reform plan, launched in 2009, marked the first phase towards achieving comprehensive universal health coverage by 2020. The governments undertaking of systemic reform and its affirmation of its role in financing health care together with priorities for prevention, primary care, and redistribution of finance and human resources to poor regions are positive developments. Accomplishing nearly universal insurance coverage in such a short time is commendable. However, transformation of money and insurance coverage into cost-effective services is difficult when delivery of health care is hindered by waste, inefficiencies, poor quality of services, and scarcity and maldistribution of the qualified workforce. China must reform its incentive structures for providers, improve governance of public hospitals, and institute a stronger regulatory system, but these changes have been slowed by opposition from stakeholders and lack of implementation capacity. The pace of reform should be moderated to allow service providers to develop absorptive capacity. Independent, outcome-based monitoring and evaluation by a third-party are essential for mid-course correction of the plans and to make officials and providers accountable.

Realignment of incentives for health-care providers in China

The Chinese government has committed to increasing government funding for health care by directing 1-1.5 percent of its gross domestic product to universal basic health care. However, China is at a loss as to how to transform its new money into efficient and effective health care. This paper critically examines the various options currently under heated debate in China. We argue that unless China tackles the root cause of unaffordable health care--rapid cost inflation caused by an irrational and wasteful health care delivery system--much of the new money is likely to be captured by providers as higher income and profits.

Non-evidence-based policy: How effective is China's new cooperative medical scheme in reducing medical impoverishment? ☆

Inappropriate incentives as part of Chinas fee-for-service payment system have resulted in rapid cost increase, inefficiencies, poor quality, unaffordable health care, and an erosion of medical ethics. To reverse these outcomes, a strategy of experimentation to realign incentives for providers with the social goals of improvement in quality and efficiency has been initiated in China. This Review shows how lessons that have been learned from international experiences have been improved further in China by realignment of the incentives for providers towards prevention and primary care, and incorporation of a treatment protocol for hospital services. Although many experiments are new, preliminary evidence suggests a potential to produce savings in costs. However, because these experiments have not been scientifically assessed in China, evidence of their effects on quality and health outcome is largely missing. Although a reform of the providers payment can be an effective short-term strategy, professional ethics need to be re-established and incentives changed to alter the profit motives of Chinese hospitals and physicians alike. When hospitals are given incentives to achieve maximum profit, incentives for hospitals and physicians must be separated.

Physician response to Medicare fee reductions: changes in the volume of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgeries in the Medicare and private sectors

In recent years, many lower to middle income countries have looked to insurance as a means to protect their populations from medical impoverishment. In 2003, the Chinese government initiated the New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS), a government-run voluntary insurance program for its rural population. The prevailing model of NCMS combines medical savings accounts with high-deductible catastrophic hospital insurance (MSA/Catastrophic). To assess the effectiveness of this approach in reducing medical impoverishment, we used household survey data from 2006 linked to claims records of health expenditures to simulate the effect of MSA/Catastrophic on reducing the share of individuals falling below the poverty line (headcount), and the amount by which household resources fall short of the poverty line (poverty gap) due to medical expenses. We compared the effects of MSA/Catastrophic to Rural Mutual Health Care (RMHC), an experimental model that provides first dollar coverage for primary care, hospital services and drugs with a similar premium but a lower ceiling. Our results show that RMHC is more effective at reducing medical impoverishment than NCMS. Under the internationally accepted poverty line of US

The Health Care Systems Of China And India: Performance And Future Challenges

1.08 per person per day, the MSA/Catastrophic models would reduce the poverty headcount by 3.5-3.9% and the average poverty gap by 11.8-16.4%, compared with reductions of 6.1-6.8% and 15-18.5% under the RMHC model. The primary reason for this is that NCMS does not address a major cause of medical impoverishment: expensive outpatient services for chronic conditions. As such, health policymakers need first to examine the disease profile and health expenditure pattern of a population before they can direct resources to where they will be most effective. As chronic diseases impose a growing share of the burden on the population in developing countries, it is not necessarily true that insurance coverage focusing on expensive hospital care alone is the most effective at providing financial risk protection.

Harnessing the privatisation of China's fragmented health-care delivery

The demand inducement hypothesis predicts that physicians will respond to reductions in their income by increasing the volume of their services when the income effect is strong and negative. I test for such inducement in the market for coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), using a longitudinal panel of physicians in New York and Washington states. The results show that physicians whose incomes were reduced the most by Medicare fee cuts performed higher volumes of CABGs, and they did so in both the Medicare and private markets.

Addressing government and market failures with payment incentives: Hospital reimbursement reform in Hainan, China

Both China and India have recently committed to injecting new public funds into health care. Both countries are now deciding how best to channel the additional funds to produce benefits for their populations. In this paper we analyze how well the health care systems of China and India have performed and what determines their performance. Based on the analysis, we suggest that money alone, channeled through insurance and infrastructure strengthening, is inadequate to address the current problems of unaffordable health care and heavy financial risk, and the future challenges posed by aging populations that are increasingly affected by noncommunicable diseases.

Hospital Competition under Regulated Prices: Application to Urban Health Sector Reforms in China

Summary Although Chinas 2009 health-care reform has made impressive progress in expansion of insurance coverage, much work remains to improve its wasteful health-care delivery. Particularly, the Chinese health-care system faces substantial challenges in its transformation from a profit-driven public hospital-centred system to an integrated primary care-based delivery system that is cost effective and of better quality to respond to the changing population needs. An additional challenge is the governments latest strategy to promote private investment for hospitals. In this Review, we discuss how Chinas health-care system would perform if hospital privatisation combined with hospital-centred fragmented delivery were to prevail—population health outcomes would suffer; health-care expenditures would escalate, with patients bearing increasing costs; and a two-tiered system would emerge in which access and quality of care are decided by ability to pay. We then propose an alternative pathway that includes the reform of public hospitals to pursue the public interest and be more accountable, with public hospitals as the benchmarks against which private hospitals would have to compete, with performance-based purchasing, and with population-based capitation payment to catalyse coordinated care. Any decision to further expand the for-profit private hospital market should not be made without objective assessment of its effect on Chinas health-policy goals.