Ms. Liang sat in the Shenzhen Longcheng Hospital, a private hospital in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, to receive treatment for her arms, which were injured during work two months ago. All of her treatment expenses had been covered by insurance, she told reporters, indicating a sense of relief since hospital treatment can be very costly in China, especially when it is not covered by medical insurance.
Private hospitals like this one have seen a spate of supportive measures issued by the Shenzhen city government in recent years, including subsidies, tax reductions, cheaper land costs and allowing insurance to cover treatments. Similar encouraging policies have also been proposed in other cities and provinces across China.
As people become richer and are able to afford better medical treatment, the healthcare industry in China has begun to flourish. The total cost of medical care is estimated to have reached 4 trillion yuan last year, maintaining an increase of 1 trillion yuan every two or three years, according to an official report issued last month. In the first quarter of this year, the healthcare industry grew by 17.4 percent from the same time last year.
"Healthcare has been one of the fastest growing industries in household consumption in Western countries in the past 150 years, maintaining a long-standing increase 1.6 times higher than income. In the past few years, the development of the healthcare industry in China has also stood out, making it a pillar of the modern service industry and a leading industry in China's economic growth," said Liu Guo'en, an expert advising on the country's healthcare reform.
Private hospitals have also ridden the waves of the flourishing industry, making up 52.6 percent of all the hospitals in China. But despite this, private hospitals still see much fewer patients than public ones. Data shows that a total of 2.71 billion visits were made to public hospitals in 2015, while only 370 million visits were made to private ones, a more than seven to one difference.
"Though the number of private hospitals increases rapidly, public hospitals still have the lion's share of the market. This is because China's medical treatment follows an 'inverted pyramid' pattern, where first-class hospitals still claim most outpatients and inpatients. Normally there should be more patients in primary-level hospitals," said Cai Jiangnan, an expert studying healthcare policies and economics.
He attributed it to the unbalanced allocations of medical resources in China: Public hospitals, especially major ones, often enjoy more resources and benefits, including entry into the medical treatment market, ratings, scientific research and medical insurance.
Doctors in private hospitals complain that they need to publish academic papers in key journals to apply for more senior titles -- which directly impacts their income and career development -- but those papers often have to be involved in national-level scientific research programs, which are often unavailable in private hospitals.
Private hospitals also have to struggle with the difficulties of attracting investment. It often takes eight to 10 years for a newly established hospital to make ends meet, while investment, which seeks quicker and better yields, tends to go to major public hospitals instead of private ones.
Experts have also been talking about the lack of talented doctors in private hospitals. In China, doctors have to register with a certain hospital to carry out their practice, where their earnings are often undervalued. Although a policy allowing doctors to practice in more than one institution was issued several years ago, the reaction turned out to be lukewarm because there are still many restrictions.
Late last month, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced that it is studying the possibility of scraping the stringent headcount quota system in public hospitals -- public hospitals across China have a certain quota for the doctors it can employ, which not only decide doctor's pay, pensions and other welfare benefits, but also the funding hospitals can get. The scraping of the quota system is likely to encourage more doctors to seek practices outside of public hospitals, experts say, though the exact timetable has not been announced.
