Struggles and victories in Chinese and Indian health issues

“Health Affairs: The Policy Journal of the Health Sphere” held a briefing on health in India and China. China faces a massive obesity epidemic and problems with insurance coverage. India is confronting AIDS. And, both China and India have aging populations.

Philip Musgrove, Deputy Editor of “Health Affairs,” said that although it seems that infant mortality is decreasing and health spending is increasing in China and India, those positive results are deceptive. He said that lower infant mortality rates do not necessarily reflect better health. Also, the increased health spending is out-of-pocket, not national funding. He said that China struggles to help people in the interior of the country and that India must help citizens in areas that have not kept up with national progress.

Kees Kostermans of the World Bank said that India handles its AIDS problems well. Their programs started early, in 1987, with strong focuses on prevention and data collection. Because of India’s high level of political commitment and ambitious programs targeted to high-risk groups, HIV prevalence in India decreased.

Somnath Chatterji from the World Health Organization added that Chinese and Indian populations are aging. He said that in the next four decades, 40 percent of the world’s old will live in India and China. The two nations’ populations are growing older, but health is getting worse. He recommended educating and empowering people to care for themselves now rather than wait for the sudden increase in mortality.

On the topic of Chinese health insurance, Tsung-Mei Cheng from Princeton University said that China hopes to achieve universal health coverage by 2020.