The Communist Party of China has said the upcoming Third Plenary Session of its current 20th Central Committee will focus on “deepening comprehensive reform to advance Chinese modernisation.” Based on past practice and some recent public reports, Beijing is drafting its agenda now, but details are hard to come by.

To piece together potential changes, observers will have to keep their eyes wide open, and I believe the Seventh meeting of the Standing Committee of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), held between June 4 and June 6, is meaningful to gauge the July agenda, for three reasons:

1. The CPPCC is an official body of political advisors, meaning its very job is to advise top decision-makers.

2. The CPPCC has officially published some recommendations for policy changes by some political advisors, throwing its institutional weight behind them.

3. The political advisors whose recommendations have been publicised by the CPPCC are influential. Most of them are current or former senior government officials, with “senior” in the Chinese mainland context being typically defined as officials at or above the rank of vice provincial and vice-ministerial. The rest are figures at the top of their fields in China.

The CPPCC has released 14 recommendations from 14 political advisors in the meeting entitled “Building high-level socialist market system”.

Today, let’s start with two of them focusing on potential changes to China’s state-run healthcare insurance system, a subject that I care most about because it impacts directly the well-being of the 1.4 billion people, who I truly care about.

The national medical security system in China is a multilevel system, with the basic medical insurance (BMI) as the pillar. The BMI system serves two groups of people: employees and residents. Employees are enrolled in the employee basic medical insurance (EBMI) program, and non-working residents are enrolled in the residents basic medical insurance (RBMI) program.

According to China’s National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA), the BMI system covers 1.33 billion people, over 95% of the Chinese population. Among them, 371 million are enrolled in the EBMI system and 963 million are enrolled in the RBMI system, by the end of 2023.

It’s important to note that the BMI system is highly fragmented. Despite that China is a unitary state led by the........

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