On 7 April, the Chinese government formally approved a long-awaited health-care plan. China's nominally communist regime has, until now, left health care to a wildly profit-driven and generally unreliable system that has cut many citizens off from basic medical attention. The new plan commits 850 billion renminbi (US$124 billion) over the next three years to begin correcting that situation, and marks the first concrete step towards a goal of providing health care to all Chinese people by the year 2020. Among the plan's initiatives are 29,000 new local medical centres and 2,000 new county-level hospitals to reach more rural Chinese; additional training for 1.37 million village-level and 160,000 community-level doctors; a requirement that all doctors spend a year in rural areas; an overhaul of the insurance system; and caps on drug prices.
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