Bigger than Ben Hur: relaxation of hukou system will provide healthcare for China's 270 million floating population

BY MICHAEL WOODHEAD
If the relaxation of hukou (residence permit) regulations announced by the State Council is actually enacted in practice, this will have a profound effect on healthcare access for a quarter of a billion Chinese.

This week the State Council announced that local governments were being instructed to adopt new regulations that will allow nonresidents to get a household registration. This registration will give the floating rural migrants access to basic public services such as education and healthcare, and family planning services. The changes could potentially affect 270 million internal migrants who have moved from rural areas or regional small towns to the larger and more prosperous cities of China. Until now this floating population has been denied access to healthcare facilities in the cities, leading to the development of many unofficial backstreet clinics. The main problem for migrant workers was that their hukou only entitled them to healthcare in their place of residence registration. This also applied to their children.

However, it pays to read the fine print - this does not mean that city hospitals will be immediately swamped by rural migrants seeking healthcare. The new regulations say that city governments should extend 'basic' services only to nonresidents who qualify for residence via a points test based on factors such as length of residence (as much as seven years) and stable employment. Many rural migrants will only qualify for temporary residence cards in the cities, which may limit their access to healthcare.

According to Xinhua, the State Council made the changes because "if these issues can not be effectively addressed in the long-term, it will trigger a series of social risks and contradictions."

However, some media commentators have been asking whether the legislation is premature because local governments are neither willing nor able to provide additional healthcare services to 'outsiders'

The other questions being asked in the Chinese media are: what are the criteria that will allow a nonresident to acquire city registration? Also, what level of services will the be eligible for? Another important question being posed by analysts is what kind of effect the widening of hukou system will have on current city residents? Will they be crowded out of hospitals and healthcare service by the onrush of outsiders?

One expert from the Renmin University, Beijing, also pointed to a potential problem with the loosening of the hukou system: the degrading of the funding base for rural health services. Professor Yang Junhua said many rural areas had already seen huge migration from the their towns and villages, depleting their tax revenue base, meaning they were unable to support services for the 'left behind' residents who tended to be either older and retired or young children. Allowing rural residents to switch their hukou to cities would further undermine the viability of rural healthcare services, he warned.

Professor Yang also predicted that there would be resistance on the ground from city governments to implementing the new regulations, and thus the central government would have to be strict in monitoring and enforcing the rollout of any hukou reforms.

Nevertheless, if fully implemented the new residency regulations are a 'game changing' step for China and have major implications for healthcare. The 'floating population' have long been neglected in terms of healthcare and many of the rural migrants in cities have poor healthcare as a result: unable to access health services they have missed out on basic services such as vaccination, leading to outbreaks of infections such as measles. The new residency rules could have more of an impact on China's healthcare system than the recent more widely publicised two child policy.

Eight medical stories from China you should read

by Michael Woodhead

1. Beijing will start to enforce new anti-smoking laws with 200 yuan on-the-spot fines (up from 10 yuan) for people who smoke in public indoor shared areas, and institutional fines of 30,000 yuan (up from 5000 yuan). Cameras will be used to compensate for the lack of enforcement officers, especially after hours, the city government says.

2. The Chinese government has been accused of withholding medical care from dissidents. An article by Sophie Richardson in the WSJ says civil rights campaigner Cao Shunli is now in intensive care because she was denied access to medical care while detained for her efforts to promote a civil society.

3. A link has been found between damp housing in Shanghai and rates of asthma in children. Researchers from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology say asthma symptoms could be reduced by 25% by simply keeping a child's window open at night.

4. A vaccine against enterovirus 71 developed by Sinovac Biotech has proved effective against EV71-associated hand, foot, and mouth disease or herpangina in infants and young children, according to a study in 5000 children done by the Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

5. Eating shark fin is not only cruel and bad for the environment, it is also a health hazard because of high mercury levels in the product, researchers from Zhejiang have shown. After testing samples of shark fin they found that up to 33% contained toxic levels of mercury.

6. Antibiotics are widely overused by parents in rural China, with more than 60% dosing their children with antibiotics bought over the counter, Shanghai researchers have found. Most parents were ignorant about how antibiotics worked and had little idea hat they do not help viral infections.

7. Migrant workers have little access to healthcare and many of them put off seeing a doctor for illness, a survey in Shanghai has found. Two thirds of migrant workers said they had never had a medical check up and nearly 40% said they had ignored symptoms because they couldn't get to see a doctor.

8. Health workers in Guangdong have completed a successful pilot trial of a cervical cancer screening program using the ThinPrep cytological system. The program offered Pap test cancer screening to more than 40,000 women, and found that improvements are needed in basic education regarding cervical cancer screening for young and poorly educated women.

Doctor attacked for refusing drip | National roaming needed for medical insurance | Community HIV testing | Hand, foot and mouth disease surveyed

Doctor assaulted for refusing to put feverish child on IV drip
China's unscientific obsession with IV infusions for every malady has been brought into focus by an assault on a doctor at a Shenzhen hospital. In a widely reported story, it was said that a family attacked a doctor at a Shenzhen children's hospital when the doctor refused to arrange an IV infusion for a one year old child with a cold. The child had been brought into the hospital by his parents and was given oral medication after it was found to be feverish and diagnosed with a viral respiratory tract infection. However, the family were not satisfied with the oral medication and went back to see the doctor to demand their child be given an 'infusion'. When the doctor refused, the child's father smacked him in the face several times until the doctor was bleeding from the mouth. The attack was only stopped after the intervention of security guards and nurses. The attacker was taken into police custody where he will remain for at least three days while his case is investigated.

Health insurance won't work for floating population
China's goal of providing universal national health insurance is being hampered by the huge 'floating population' of migrant workers, a report has found. While more than 90% of the population are now covered by some kind of medical insurance scheme, the reality is that China's 240 million  'floating population' cannot take advantage of their insurance because it is only valid in their home town or province. This means that many migrant workers and their families from rural and regional areas face large medical bills that they cannot get any compensation for. IN some cases, floating workers will return home to take advantage of medical facilities where they can get some reimbursement, the report said. Integration of China medical insurance schemes is fraught with difficulty because different provinces and cities have different insurance schemes with different premiums and entitlements, the report notes. This means that local hospitals and health insurance schemes are unwilling to deal with 'outside people'. The solution may be some kind of 'national roaming' scheme for health insurance, the report concludes

Community HIV testing a hit
Rapid HIV testing is well accepted and detects many HIV positive people when offered by community clinics in China to high risk patient , a study has shown. In a trial of rapid HIV testing involving 42 sites community health centres in China, 23,609 patients underwent HIV testing. The positive screening prevalence was 0.41%, which is higher than in general hospitals (0.17%). Published in PLOS One, the study findings provide concrete evidence to support the involvement of community health clinics in the expansion of HIV/AIDS testing and case finding, said the researchers from the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing.

Hand foot and mouth disease surveyed
China's largest ever study of hand, foot, and mouth disease has shown that it is most common in June in north China, whereas southern China has semiannual outbreaks in May and September. The review of seven million cases cases of hand, foot, and mouth disease showed the annual incidence was 1·2 per 1000 person-years, of which 2457 (0·03%) were fatal. The incidence and mortality were highest in children aged 12-23 months, according to the study published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Hypertension more common among Mongolians
A study carried out in northern China has found that hypertension is more common among ethnic Mongolians. Mongolian and Han populations in northeast China. In a study of 4753 Mongolian people and 20,247 Han people, rates of newly diagnosed hypertension over a four year period
were 12.64 per 100 person-years for Mongolians and 9.77 for Han. The rates of awareness of hypertension were low for both Mongolians (36.5%) and Han (42.3%) Likewise, rates of treatment (13.1% vs. 18.2%) and control of hypertension (0.7% vs. 1.3%),were low among both Mongolian and Han population, the study in PLOS One found.

Nanjing offers free health checks to migrant workers

Nanjing city launched on Tuesday a free physical examination program for migrant workers at construction sites in the city and the first batch of 170,000 workers have already started to enjoy free physical examination.
The city released in September a new regulation on enhancing basic medical care and treatments for construction workers, which stipulates that all construction operators in Nanjing whose major disease medical insurances are valid can enjoy a free check-up after they receive the Nanjing Resident Card.
Before that, construction workers in Nanjing already enjoyed the favorable policy of “refund for 50 to 80 percent of medical care bills below 800 yuan” and refund for over 80 percent of hospitalization expenses if their medical insurance covers related treatments.
Statistics show there are some 500,000 migrant workers at construction sites in Nanjing.
Source: Jiangsu China