【正文】 h they can be addressed. . Affordable access to health care and financial risk protection By focusing national energies towards achieving universal health insurance coverage, the Chinese health reform tackles one of the fundamental problems underlying unequal and unaffordable access to health care, as well as the major financial risk due to medical expenditures. Expanded health insurance coverage should reduce financial barriers to access. However, as discussed in section 2, another root cause of unaffordable access to care and impoverishment due to medical expenditures is the rapid growth in health expenditure stemming from waste and inefficiencies within the system. Both economic theory and international experience tell us that health insurance coverage coupled with a feeforservice provider payment method will further exacerbate the problem of cost inflation. Because of information asymmetry, health care providers, especially those paid by feeforservice, have an incentive to induce their patients to use clinically unnecessary services that increase provider ine. When the patients are insured and do not face the full price of medical services, the incentive to induce demand is even stronger, a phenomenon known as supplyside moral hazard. In the long run, this type of provider behavior throws the sustainability of the insurance scheme into question. Since the government has already mitted a significant sum to expanding the NCMS in rural areas, it is helpful to review the evidence on how well NCMS has been able to improve access to care and reduce the financial burden due to medical expenses. NCMS was first rolled out in 2021, and some rigorously conducted evaluations are beginning to emerge. With some exceptions (., Lei amp。s call for a ―pilot‖ of public hospital reform is akin to an admission that more research must be done before more specific policy guidelines can be drawn up in this area. The government plans to examine the findings and experiences of these pilot experiments after three years. 4. A tentative assessment In this section, we examine how well China39。 Chen, 2021). Like NCMS, government subsidies for enrollment in URBMI are targeted to reach 120 RMB in 2021. However, since health expenditure is more expensive in urban areas, this means that the share of premium paid by individuals will be significantly higher in urban than in rural areas. ( Lin et al., 2021). In addition, funding will also be increased for the Medical Assistance program, a safety program introduced between 2021 and 2021 to provide financial assistance with health care payments for the poorest and most vulnerable residents in both rural and urban areas, especially those covered by the Wu Bao (Five Special Categories, including veterans, lowine individuals without children, etc.), Te Kun and Di Bao (Households falling below official poverty lines) social assistance programs ( Wagstaff, Lindelow, Wang, amp。s cities by the end of the year, with the goal of ultimately extending coverage to all Chinese cities by 2021 ( Cheng, 2021。 needs rather than in terms of increasing their own ine. To improve equity in resource allocation, more resources will be targeted to lowerine regions and rural areas. These additional resources will be used to build new health facilities and to improve public health service delivery facilities so that they are of parable quality to those in more economically developed areas. Limited insurance coverage is a fundamental cause of unaffordable health care. To address this issue, a significant share of the new government spending will be used to subsidize individuals39。s path to establishing a strong national health care system. Following the guiding principle of building a harmonious society by balancing economic and social development, equity is given a high priority. Moreover, the reform announcement explicitly declares that the government has an important role to play in the health care sector and that this health care reform is governmentled. This marks a major departure from the heavy reliance on the market that has been the hallmark of the financing and anization of China39。s health care system suffers from a number of deeply rooted problems. A distorted pricing schedule, bined with a financing system that puts intense pressure on providers of all levels to bring in revenues, has led to an overprovision of hightech diagnostic tests/services and expensive drugs at the expense of basic health care services. In addition to the potential harm this can cause patients, this has also led to a rapidly rising rate of health care expenditures, far outstripping the growth in national GDP. Moreover, limited financial risk protection means that individual patients bear the brunt of these high health care costs in the form of outofpocket spending. Finally, these problems are not distributed equally throughout the country—the poor and those living in rural areas are the hardest hit. Does the new health reform offer a solution to any of these problems? 3. China39。 Zhao, 2021). A recent econometric study also empirically shows that provincial government budget deficits are a significant factor in explaining inequalities in public expenditures on health across regions ( Chou amp。 Mahal, 2021。s health care system is plagued with major inequalities. As Tables 1 and 2 show, even within the rural and urban areas there exist ine disparities in the financial burden of health, with rural residents in the lowest ine quintile spending the highest percent of their ine on health care. Other studies have also documented significant inequalities in health care utilization and health outes in China ( Tang et al., 2021。s ine in 1993, the cost was twice as high as an individual39。 financial risk when they are faced with illnesses. Between 1993 and 2021, while real ine per capita