Int. J. Healthcare Technology and Management, Vol. 16, Nos. 1/2, 2017 29 Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. China’s future healthcare system: what is the role for private production and financing? Åke Blomqvist Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Email: ake.blomqvist@carleton.ca Jiwei Qian* East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore Email: jiwei.qian@nus.edu.sg *Corresponding author Abstract: In China, the private sector may make healthcare markets more competitive, thereby improving affordability, increasing the supply and quality of healthcare services and improving the accessibility to healthcare. It can also improve financial coverage via private health insurance, as a substitute or complement to government plans. However, strict regulation, insurance designation bias against private hospitals, insufficient risk-management capacity and crowding out by social health insurance have hampered private sector involvement in health services production and insurance. We argue that the best option at China’s current state of development may be a compromise model in which competing private providers are given an important role, but in which the government intervenes in such a way as to attain both a high degree of equity of access to healthcare, and to avoid the most significant forms of ‘market failure’ in an unregulated private system. Keywords: health insurance; healthcare service provision; private sector; China. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Blomqvist, A. and Qian, J. (2017) ‘China’s future healthcare system: what is the role for private production and financing?’, Int. J. Healthcare Technology and Management, Vol. 16, Nos. 1/2, pp.29–43. Biographical notes: Åke Blomqvist received his PhD in Economics from Princeton in 1971. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until 2002 when he moved to the National University of Singapore. During 2009–2011 he was with the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing. He currently lives in Ottawa and is affiliated with Carleton University and the C.D. Howe Institute. His areas of research have included economics of developing countries, and economics of healthcare, including health financing and policy in Canada and China. Jiwei Qian is a Research Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University. His forthcoming book is The Rise of the Regulatory State in the Chinese Health-Care System (World Scientific, 2017). His current research interests include health economics, political economy and development economics.