Raising physician incomes has pushed health care reform, and there has been substantial progress

The 19th meeting of the Central Deep Reform Commission adopted the "deepening the price reform of medical services pilot program" clearly mentioned: for complex projects of great technical difficulty, the government should play a good role, respect the professional advice of hospitals and doctors, to better reflect the value of technical labor. In fact, in recent years, the Party Central Committee deployed to promote a series of reforms, through the abolition of drug markup, with the centralized procurement and strengthening cost control, the price of drugs and supplies down, the people's burden is reduced, but also to adjust the price of medical services to create the conditions. The meeting stressed that deepening the reform of medical services prices, to standardize the management of medical services price items, the establishment of goal-oriented price project management mechanism, so that medical services price items better pricing, better implementation, better evaluation, more adaptable to clinical treatment and price management needs.

Some analysts pointed out that the adoption of the program will mean that, after continuing to promote the collection of high-value consumables, the next step will be to break the key link to drugs to feed the doctor and improve the income of doctors. Liang Wannian, former director of the Department of Institutional Reform of the National Health Care Commission, said publicly in 2017 that the core of the medical system reform is to replace birds with cages, and how to squeeze out the water of drugs and consumables and reasonably backfill doctors will become the key to the success of the medical reform. The core of the so-called "cage for a bird" is that in the past, doctors "promoted" drugs and consumables, which accounted for about 60% to 70% of the materialized income, and only about 30% of the medical income really reflects the value of labor and technology. Liang Wannian has publicly stated that if this reform is carried out, the internal revenue structure will be adjusted under the premise that the total revenue framework remains unchanged or grows normally, and in turn, the overall revenue from drugs and consumables should drop to less than 50%.

However, behind this series of reforms, it is necessary to balance the interests between doctors, departments and hospitals, and to make up for the lack of service income in order to truly mobilize medical staff motivation. It is foreseeable that the collection of high-value consumables will continue, and how to squeeze out the water of drugs and consumables and reasonably backfill to doctors will become the key to the success of medical reform.