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In the medical practice in China, giving and taking "red envelopes" (monetary gifts) is a common phenomenon although few openly admit it. This paper, based on our empirical study including data collected from interviews and questionnaires with medical professionals and patients, attempts to explore why "red envelopes" have become a serious problem in the physician-patient relationship and how the situation can be improved. Previous studies show that scholars tend to correlate the spread of "red envelopes" in health care sector to the commercialization trend, the general erosion of traditional values, and the lowering of the moral level in the medical field. However, in this paper, the authors argue that medical professionals' choice of taking "red envelopes" is actually more a way to compensate for their problematic self-image and marred dignity in real practice. Medical professionals in China as a whole are in an embarrassing situation where the work pressure and income, and the sense of pride that used to be part of their profession are not comparable to each other. Under this circumstance, we believe that the effective way to deal with the "red envelopes" issue does not lie solely in introducing more stringent regulations or granting medical professionals higher payments, but rather in protecting and enhancing the professional dignity of all those working in healthcare. And on top of that, there must also be effort to cultivate a more favorable moral environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How health care providers are paid affects how medicine is practiced. It is thus important to assess provider payment models not only from the economic perspective but also from the ethical perspective. China recently started to reform the provider payment model in the health care system from fee-for-service to case-based payment. This paper aims to examine this transition from an ethical perspective. We collected empirical studies on the impact of case-based payment in the Chinese health care system and applied a systematic ethical matrix that integrates clinical ethics and public health ethics to analyze the empirical findings. We identified eleven prominent ethical issues related to case-based payment. Some ethical problems of case-based payment in China are comparable to ethical problems of managed care and diagnosis related groups in high-income countries. However, in this paper we discuss in greater detail four specific ethical issues in the Chinese context: professionalism, the patient-physician relationship, access to care and patient autonomy. Based on the analysis, we cautiously infer that case-based payment is currently more ethically acceptable than fee-for-service in the context of China, mainly because it seems to lower financial barriers to access care. Nonetheless, it will be difficult to justify the implementation of case-based payment if no additional measures are taken to monitor and minimize its existing negative ethical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on two years' ethnographic research on doctor-patient relations in urban China, this paper examines the causes of patients' mistrust of physicians. I identify the major factors at the societal, institutional, and interpersonal levels that lead to patients' mistrust of physicians. First, I set the context by describing the extent of mistrust at the societal level. Then, I investigate the institutional sources of mistrust. I argue that the financing mechanism of public hospitals and physicians' income structures are the most crucial factors in inducing patients' mistrust. Hospitals' heavy reliance on self-finance has basically caused public hospitals to run like private hospitals, resulting in blatant conflicts of interest between hospitals and patients. Related to this is physicians' reliance on bonuses and commissions as part of their regular incomes, which has inevitably resulted in overtreatment and, hence, mistrust from the patients. At the interpersonal level, I describe how individual physicians' attitudes toward and interaction with patients may also affect patients' sense of trust or mistrust in physicians. In conclusion, I discuss the ethical implications of the mistrust problem, and suggest changes at the institutional and interpersonal levels to mitigate the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles in the issue on topics including socio-political, cultural and healthcare context of patient-physician mistrust; and implications of patient–physician trust and mistrust in the Chinese context.