ABSTRACT
The government paid almost the entire cost of medical care for its employees; state-owned enterprises also subsidized health care highly. Workplace and government clinics and hospitals provided urban health services. The government also financed and organized preventive programmes. The chapter considers urban health systems in the context of China's demographic and epidemiological transition, transition to a market economy and transition to an urban, industrial society. It argues that one can best understand the process of urban health finance as an effort to agree new rules of entitlement to benefits in a period of rapid and sustained change. Decision makers have to balance claims by those with insurance against pressures to meet the needs of the uninsured. Need is a measure of the physiological and psychological status of individuals, their expectations of what constitutes well-being, the availability of effective interventions and the social arrangements that determine the roles of households and health providers in caring for the sick.
