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New Publication: Understanding medical corruption in China: a mixed-methods study

Abstract Medical corruption is a significant obstacle to achieving health-related Sustainable Development Goals. However, the understanding of medical corruption is limited, especially in developing countries. As the largest developing country, China is also plagued by medical corruption. By employing a mixed-methods design and combining data from three resources, this study attempts to examine patterns of medical corruption in China, explore its key drivers and investigate the perceived effectiveness of recent…

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China’s New Health Insurance Policies: A More Equitable System?

Recent reforms to health insurance policies in China have sparked protests in the cities of Wuhan and Dalian, with a majority of protesters being elderly people. Dr. Winnie Yip, Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics, spoke with reporters at NBC News to discuss how these reforms will affect China’s population, particularly its vulnerable groups. The primary concern of protestors is that allocating more employers’ health insurance contributions from individual…

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Disparities in China’s Urban and Rural Healthcare

In an interview with Drum Tower, a podcast by The Economist, Dr. Winnie Yip discusses the historical disparities between the quality of urban and rural healthcare in China—particularly for primary care—and what the Chinese administration has done in recent decades in response to these issues. One of Dr. Winnie Yip’s primary areas of expertise and research is in understanding health system reform in rural China, including the role of “barefoot…

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Perspectives on China’s Changing COVID Landscape

In December 2022, China announced several changes to their COVID-19 policies. Dr. Winnie Yip, Professor of Global Health Policy and Economics, spoke with several major U.S.-based media outlets to discuss indications of the Chinese government’s changing direction in regard to its longstanding “Zero-COVID” approach, as well as critical reopening strategies the government could employ in order to safely and effectively do so. Dr. Yip, who is also Faculty Director of…

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New Publication: Trends and Projections of Universal Health Coverage Indicators in China, 1993–2030: An Analysis of Data from Four Nationwide Household Surveys

Summary Background Universal health coverage (UHC) is a core element of Sustainable Development Goals and has become a global healthcare priority. China has been committing to provide all citizens with affordable and equitable basic healthcare over past decades. However, progress towards UHC in China has not been comprehensively assessed. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate the progress towards UHC in China by examining trends in service coverage and financial protection from 1993…

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New Publication: Provincial Variations in Catastrophic Health Expenditure and Medical Impoverishment in China: A Nationwide Population-Based Study

Summary Background Financial protection, as a key dimension of Universal Health Coverage (UHC), has been under increasing attention in recent years. A series of studies have examined the nationwide extent of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) and medical impoverishment (MI) in China. However, disparities in financial protection at the province level have rarely been studied. The aim of this study was to investigate provincial variations in financial protection as well as…

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Commentary: Managing the health of online care in China

The adoption of digital technologies in health care has vastly accelerated over the past two years as the COVID-19 pandemic saw health care providers switch to virtual care options like telehealth. In the United States, in-person visits to Department of Veteran Affairs facilities declined by 55 per cent from March to May 2020, while telephone and video visits increased rapidly. A similar expansion of telemedicine use was observed in Europe. In China, the use…

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New Publication: Have lower-income groups benefited more from increased government health insurance subsidies? Benefit incidence analysis in Ningxia, China

Abstract China’s government subsidies on the demand side – such as subsidizing medical insurance premiums – have accelerated progress towards universal health coverage. We examined whether the increased government subsidies had benefited the population, especially the poor. We conducted two rounds of household surveys and collected the annual claims reports of a rural medical insurance scheme in Ningxia (a relatively underdeveloped region in Western China). We used benefit incidence analysis…

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Publication: Consumer choice and public-private providers: The role of perceived prices

We investigate the role of perceived price and quality on consumer choice for four different health conditions across public and private providers using a nationally representative survey in Malaysia. We estimate a mixed logit model and show that consumers value different dimensions of quality depending on the health condition. Furthermore, increasing perceived prices for private providers reduces demand for minor, more frequent health conditions such as flu, fever, or cough,…

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Meaningful Dying and End of Life Care in China

Event Summary The medicalization of ageing has increased reliance on the use of medical treatments to prolong life. However, death represents an inevitable reality, raising important questions about what it means to provide people with a meaningful, quality death. On June 2, 2022, the Harvard China Health Partnership invited Dr. Jun JING, Professor of Social Anthropology at Tsinghua University, to explore this question in the Chinese context at an online…

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