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Rein in Red Packets

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Informal Payments and Regulations in China's Healthcare System

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Abstract

This chapter identifies two major approaches that the Chinese government has employed to govern red packets, namely, the disciplinary approach and the market approach. The disciplinary approach relies predominantly on long-established institutions and involves many CCP and governmental organs at every administrative level to investigate and discipline doctors’ behaviors in hospitals. But due to poor institutional design and conflict of interests, patients are reluctant to cooperate with the state, rendering the Party-state “powerless.” The market approach is equally unsuccessful in terms of controlling the practice as both the “patients choose doctors” scheme and the “operation by nomination” scheme tend to concentrate red packets in the hands of senior doctors.

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  1. School of International Studies, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Jingqing Yang

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Yang, J. (2017). Rein in Red Packets. In: Informal Payments and Regulations in China's Healthcare System. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2110-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2110-7_6

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