US

Experts sound alarm on health disparity

By Ariel Tung (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-08 11:22

NEW YORK - It seems that China's roaring economic growth hasn't guaranteed wider population health, and experts said they are increasingly concerned that the nation's urban-rural health disparity is getting worse.

Since 1949, the health of the average Chinese person has improved with many communicable diseases such as the plague, smallpox, cholera and typhus either wiped out or brought under control. The average life expectancy has increased in the past three decades.

But a comparison of the average life expectancies between urban and rural areas in China reveals stark differences between the underprivileged and the privileged, and the level of healthcare they get.

The average life expectancies of residents in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macao was above 80, comparable to those of the wealthiest countries in the world, according to 2005 figures from China's National Bureau of Statistics.

For residents of poorer regions such as Tibet, Yunnan, Guizhou and Qinghai, it was around 65, comparable to Tajikistan and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

What's worse it appears that China's average life expectancy is rising slower than many of the bigger developing nations. A New York Times story, which used a World Bank compilation of United Nations data, from 1990 to 2008, said life expectancy in China rose 5.1 years, to 73.1. That is slower than Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia or Iran.

Cancer, heart disease, stroke and respiratory disease are the leading causes of deaths in China, said Jeffrey Koplan, vice-president for Global Health at Emory University and director of the Emory Global Health Institute. Obesity, a common health risk in developed countries where too many calories, fat and salt are consumed, is becoming a major problem in China, Koplan said.

He noted that China's average life expectancy is not much different from that of the US. In 2006, the average life span of a Chinese was 73.5, compared with 77-78 for an American.

But as China continues to face challenges in meeting the healthcare needs of its massive population, its health facilities remain unevenly distributed.

According to the Chinese Medical Association (CMA), only about 50 percent of the country's medical and health personnel work in rural areas, where about three-fifths of the population resides. Similarly, about two-thirds of the country's hospital beds are located in cities.

Tian Hongping, director of Health Programs at Yale-China Association in Connecticut, said she believes the Chinese government is trying very hard to address some of the rural-urban disparity that she described as "really alarming".

She said many in the rural areas struggle with the burden of healthcare expenses after the reform of the State-funded health system, which existed before China's economic reforms in the 1980s.

Many who today live in the urban areas of China have their own medical insurance, but the poor, many of whom live in the countryside, either go into debt for their medical bills or go without treatment.

One of the government's recent initiatives to make healthcare more affordable for the rural poor is the New Rural Cooperative Medical Care System, where 80 percent of the individual's annual costs for medical insurance is taken on by the central and provincial governments.

About 80 percent of the rural population has signed up for the system since September 2007, according to CMA.

Still, Tian said the level of medical coverage is not enough, though she said she is quite optimistic about the Chinese health reform bill that passed last year and the direction of the reform.

China Daily