Full Text: Report on the Work of the Government(17)

3. Giving high priority to ensuring and improving people's wellbeing and comprehensively improving their material and cultural lives

An important lesson we learned in our response to the sudden outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 is that economic development and social development need to be coordinated. In developing the economy in the years since then, we have placed greater importance on ensuring and improving people's wellbeing and developing social programs, and the government has made greater efforts and provided more funding in this area than ever before. These unremitting efforts have resulted in much better coordination of China's economic and social development. The structure of Chinese society, its forms of organization, and the pattern of interests in society have all undergone profound changes, and social problems have increased markedly. We must make ensuring and improving people's wellbeing the starting point and goal of all the government's work, give higher priority to it, and strive to strengthen social development.

We should do all we can to increase employment. We should persevere in implementing the strategy of giving top priority to employment and adopt a more proactive employment policy. We should create more jobs by maintaining stable economic growth and adjusting the economic structure and provide better vocational skills training to help people to find jobs or start their own businesses. We should increase government spending and policy support, improve the employment services system, stimulate employment by encouraging business startups, assist target groups in finding jobs, and stimulate sustained, steady increases in urban and rural incomes.

We should improve the social security system. We should continue to follow the policy of making coverage universal, ensuring basic care, and providing multilevel and sustainable social security. We should expand the coverage of social security, turn over the overall management of social security accounts to higher-level authorities, raise social security benefits, improve and coordinate all social security programs, make social security more equitable and sustainable, and facilitate the smooth transfer of social security accounts between localities. This year, basic old-age pensions for enterprise retirees should be raised by another 10%, and subsistence allowances for urban and rural residents and subsidies for entitled groups should also be further raised. Greater support should be given to developing child welfare agencies and the system of social services for the elderly.

We should advance reform and development of medical and health care services, consolidate and improve the system for using basic drugs and the new operating mechanisms of community-level medical and health care institutions, speed up the reform of public hospitals, and encourage nongovernmental bodies to operate hospitals. We should support development of traditional Chinese medicine and ethnic minority medicine. We should improve the universal medical insurance system, establish a mechanism to provide insurance and aid for treating major and very serious diseases, and conduct a pilot project to insure against 20 serious diseases. (Note: They are childhood leukemia, congenital heart disease in children, uremia, breast cancer, cervical cancer, holergasia, drug-resistant tuberculosis, opportunistic AIDS and HIV infection, lung cancer, esophagus cancer, gastric cancer, colon cancer, rectal cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia, acute myocardial infarction, cerebral infarction, hemophilia, type 1 diabetes, hyperthyroidism, and cheilopalatognathus.) This year, annual government subsidies for the new rural cooperative medical care system and basic medical insurance for non-working urban residents should be raised from 240 yuan to 280 yuan per person respectively, and the per person payment standard for basic public health services should be increased from 25 yuan to 30 yuan.