Li Bin, the minister of China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission has remarked that the country’s healthcare reforms should provide a basic medical system that assures people benefit from the reforms.

Li made the comment during a tour of Shaanxi province, April 8-10, where she spoke with medical personnel and patients to learn more about the province’s public hospital reforms, medical care system, community-level healthcare, and health education and informatization.

She praised Shaanxi for its improvement in healthcare and noted, ”Shaanxi’s achievements in some key fields can be used as experience for other provinces across the country,” then emphasized the need to continue the healthcare reforms and abolish the practice of profiting from drug sales.

Other areas of improvement are medical insurance for urban and rural people with serious illnesses across the country, and medical insurance payments, as well as better medical services and medical staff and equipment for communities, and reformed centralized drug purchasing of public hospitals to ensure adequate drug supplies.

She concluded by calling for standardized, competitive, more effective medicine distribution, better community-level medical institutes, and better training for medical staff at the community-level for greater equality in basic public health services.