Health authorities have recently ordered China’s public hospitals to stop their expansion, blaming this growth for rising bills. According to the NationalHealth and Family Planning Commission, public hospitals want to increase the number of beds and purchase high-tech medical equipment, when they should pay more attention on their internal management issues. On the other hand, public hospitals see the expansion as a way to survive in the marketplace because trough more beds and sophisticated medical devices they could attract more patients, which means more incomes. Hospital chiefs would only agree to the authority's order if there were supporting policies to help grass-roots hospitals become more competitive.The point is that what motivates new hospitals getting built and existing hospitals being expanded is not a specific public health matter, but a political advancement. Big hospitals can bring in more revenue, a fundamental factor owing to the fact that China’s public hospitals are under-funded. If China’s hospitals continue to receive orders of magnitude more than additional funding and government reimbursement, they will keep looking for ways to generate new revenue. This means that the lack of funds will remain unresolved for as long as the foundational reimbursement system remains broken. Improving the private investments could fix these management problems. In fact, The Chinese government has just announced the launch of a pilot scheme allowing for the establishment of wholly foreign-owned hospitals (“WFOHs”) through greenfield investment or mergers and acquisitions in three centrally governed municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai), which have provincial status, and four provinces (Jiangsu, Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan). The gLAWcal Team LIBEAC project Friday, November 14, 2014 (Source: Healthintelasia.com)