Public hospitals face underfunding, falling revenues after reforms

The RMB11.1 billion (US$1.744 billion) allocated by China’s finance ministry this year to overhaul thousands of public hospitals is falling far short of the funds needed to support them in the face of falling revenue due to reforms that bar them from marking the price of prescription drugs up by as much as 15%, South China Morning Post reported, citing Hu Shanlian, a public health professor at Fudan University. The funding “is surely not enough. Now that hospitals are no longer allowed to mark up drugs, the drop in their revenue is huge, especially in bigger hospitals of higher rankings,” Hu said.