Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at length with Tsung-Mei Cheng, one of the world’s leading academics covering the evolution of health care systems around the world, with special focus on Taiwan and China.  Tsung-Mei is the co-founder of the annual Princeton Conference on Health Policy, and she is Health Policy Research Analyst [...]

Amid the Ministry of Health’s recently announced goal to increase current level of patient visits to private, for-profit hospitals from 8% to 20% by 2015, and private hospitals being moved to the “encouraged” category for FDI, foreign hospital operators and private equity firms are poised to make a lot of money acquiring underperforming public hospitals and develop private hospitals. But, as more room is made for private investment, an increasing collection of homegrown Chinese private equity firms may be positioned to benefit more than their foreign counterparts.

It’s far from clear that most employees in public hospitals can be regarded as public employees, as that term is commonly defined in a market system. Indeed, confidently being able to define who within a Chinese public hospital is or is not a public employee, is or is not a civil servant, has or does not have some sort of bianzhi is a question that has proven hard to answer. Nevertheless, this may simply be because not enough people have taken the time to look. I think that this question would be a very valuable topic of research because it could lead to a great proxy for healthcare demand. Let me explain.

Few would argue that hospitals are one of the more important aspects of China’s healthcare system that need to be overhauled.  In China, hospitals play an outsized role in the delivery of healthcare relative to how similar interventions are experienced in the West.   In the absence of strong primary care foundation, China’s hospitals are likely [...]

In today’s Asia Times, I have a column on what MNC pharmaceuticals in China are facing.  Generally, their are two macro trends impacting these companies:  the need to expand healthcare to China’s masses (most of whom have deplorable access today) under extraordinary cost controls and, the maturation of specific policies China agreed to decades ago [...]

Nowhere in the world is the dual healthcare challenge of price control and expanded coverage more clear than in China.  The human need for expanded coverage is acute; yet, finding policies that will empower industry to meet these challenges many times run at cross-purposes with the short-term cost containment objectives of government planners.  Some western [...]

Over at today’s Asia Times, I have a column up on China’s healthcare reforms.  In it, I argue that not since Deng smashed the “iron rice bowl” has the country faced as difficult, nor as sensitive, a set of reforms.  Unlike Deng’s reforms, the country now enjoys a certain wealth while access to healthcare has [...]

The niche to become the exclusive distributor of China news is wide open. I had a classmate from undergrad who worked at the NBC new China headquarters, in Beijing, before the Olympics, and the office only had 8 people. That’s just not big enough to cover much of anything, in China. The scene is begging for some serious competition. I figured that one way we could help the reporting scene is by providing guides on China story angles. Here’s one on China’s healthcare reform