Health care reform could be prescription for employment

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-04-09 16:10

BEIJING -- China's 850 billion yuan (US$124 billion) raft of health care reforms, announced this week, are mainly meant to improve care for rural and poor residents and spur domestic demand.

The reforms could also bring comfort to migrant workers and college graduates.

It's an unusually tough time for job-seekers in China. Human Resources and Social Security Minister Yin Weimin has warned of a "grave" employment situation, despite "a reverse in the declining trend" of urban job market in the first two months of this year.

About 20 million migrant workers have returned to their rural homes, and some 6.11 million college students are due to graduate this summer. Moreover, 1 million of last year's graduates who failed to get jobs in 2008are still trying their lucks this year. They all need jobs.

MEDICAL GRADUATES' PLIGHT

Xiao Chen, an undergraduate at the prestigious Peking Union Medical College, said he received no offers and not even a single interview from any of the big hospitals in Guangzhou, capital of southern Guangdong Province, where he sent dozens of job applications.

Only two district-level hospitals provided vacancies in anesthesia departments. But career prospects there were dim, he said. In China, aspiring doctors are able to work as technicians and being "promoted" to physician status. But with China's medical education and qualification system becoming more like those in the West, where graduate degrees are required, that path is becoming uncertain.

Ke Zunfu, an M.D. candidate at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong Province, said lack of opportunity for medical graduates was a national phenomenon. Large hospitals are recruiting graduates with master's or doctor's degrees. Some of them would hire undergraduates, but only for "marginal" departments such as anesthesia and radiology.

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