GLOBAL HEALTH CARE PAPER & PRESENTATION - Essay Example

By then, these efforts helped China achieve better results than those countries that they share the same level of economic development. One of the most remarkable health care reforms is patient-centered, which was introduced in 1997; the same reform agenda has formed the basis for hospital management reforms that have been introduced in China from 2005. This patient-centered approach has been promoted by improving the relationship between the doctor and the patient. Although the health care reforms in China have seen many positive results, it has also resulted to some negative impacts, which has threatened the country’s preventive health programs.

Even the recent introduction of limited health insurance for preventative services and charges for immunization has not helped salvage the situation. The money that has been gotten from these schemes have proved insufficient to finance a preventative program, which currently uses 15 percent of the Ministry of Public Health’s resources and barely 2 percent of the total health costs (Hillier & Shen, 2012). The main reason for introduction of reforms in China’s health care system was to relieve the government of some health care burden, which could be achieved by encouraging hospitals to make enough income to sustain their budgets.

In this arrangement, the hospital fee is paid by labor insurance or the patients themselves through a straight fee-for-service program. The hospitals have, therefore, been forced to raise their prices in order to cover their charges and costs. In addition, the volume of healthcare services increased in the 1980s when the insurance increased their spending by 16 percent (Hillier & Shen, 2012). The health care in China has become ‘provider-led’ due to the self-financing system by the hospitals.

This system has several shortcomings, including high cost of drugs and polypharmacy, longer in-patient waits for those who have an insurance cover, and inapt application of costly technology. The other major challenge of Chinese health care system is the inequalities that is introduced as a result of the reduced investment in township hospitals and the disintegration of rural health cooperatives. However, this system encourages CT scans such as the one belonging to those who have taken insurance cover for their health.

In addition, this system ensures a detailed payment that encourages antibiotic injections, and infusion of intravenous vitamin among other forms of treatments (Hillier & Shen, 2012). Compare & contrast China’s health system with the American System before & after the implementation of the Affordable Health Care Act. In a bid to make healthcare affordable to the poor, who makes eighty percent of its population, China has made efforts to give them basic health facilities through a national strategy; even before the introduction of affordability policy.

Unlike in the U.S., in China the accessibility of affordable healthcare has been regarded as an essential human right and hence should be availed to the whole society. This shows that the Chinese healthcare is more equal than that of the U.S. especially considering that the cost of treatment is less than that of the U.S., although the GDP of America is larger than that of China by a large margin, China has experienced a greater growth in the rate of