gif of two pharmacist scales weight drugs

China Is Striving for the World’s Best, Cheapest Healthcare

By Dong Lyu, Rachel Chang and Adrian Leung

October 20, 2019, 5:00 PM EDT

Less than five years ago, Chinese healthcare was a closed-off, low-quality system where the richest left the country for medicines and treatments, and the poorest took a bad diagnosis as a death sentence. Now, the world’s second largest economy is striving to become a place where patients can get the best, newest drugs and services faster and cheaper than anywhere else.

Pressured by its growing middle class, the Chinese government has set itself an ambitious target: first-world health outcomes at a fraction of the cost that other countries, especially the U.S., pays.

To get there, China has doubled the amount it’s pouring into public hospitals in the last five years to $38 billion. It wants to see a healthcare industry valued at $2.3 trillion by 2030, more than twice its size now.

The cost control part will be much harder. Beijing wants the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world to bend the knee, lowering their prices drastically in order to get access to its vast patient pool. In new drugs, pharmaceuticals from Pfizer to Roche have agreed to cuts of as much as 70%.

It’s an unprecedented balancing act, and the outcome will affect not just billions of Chinese patients, but the future of the global healthcare industry.

China is already catching-up to the U.S. on some important health metrics, and hopes to surpass their doctor patient ratio.

Sources: China’s National Health Commission, OECD

China is pouring billions into public hospitals and has revamped its drug approval system. Some foreign drugs and medical trials are now approved quicker than in the U.S.

Source: China’s National Health Commission

It wants the best drugs and care but it does not want to pay a hefty amount that would stress the country’s medical insurance fund.

Sources: U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Health Commission, World Bank, OECD

Sources: U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Health Commission

To pay for these drugs without busting the national budget, it wants global pharmaceutical companies to drop prices drastically in exchange for access to China’s vast patient pool.

This means Chinese patients are starting to pay much less than American patients for the same drugs.

For generic drugs, prices have dropped an average of 52% so far through a government bulk-buying program.

Source: National Healthcare Security Administration

All this activity has lured a groundswell of venture capital funding to China’s burgeoning biotech start-up space, while the biggest global pharmaceutical firms like Roche and Merck see a growing share of revenue coming from the Asian nation.

But re-making the healthcare system for the world’s most populous country won’t come without challenges. The size of the patient population in China—whether in cancer, rare diseases or simply ageing—is bigger than any other country has faced before.

Source: National Health Commission, Chinese media reports

Sources: National Bureau of Statistics of China & U.S. Census Bureau projection (normalized from December 31, 2008)

Sources: Chinese local media, U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention

At stake is not just the well-being of millions of Chinese people, but the future of the global healthcare industry. China has set its sights on creating a holy grail healthcare system that satisfies patients’ needs and control costs while still encouraging cutting-edge research—and the world is watching.