Publicizing medical costs will help improve medical services as a whole, says a commentary of Dazhong Daily. An excerpt follows:

A hospital in Changsha, Hunan Province, has just announced it will publicize the costs of treating about 20 diseases, the first time in the country that a hospital has made its financial costs available to the public.

In recent years, complaints have mounted about the medical care system and hospitals. One of the reasons is that patients do not have any idea about the real costs of treatment, examinations and other medical services.

Some hospitals even take advantage of the lack of transparency and set their prices higher than is reasonable.

Against such a backdrop, the Changsha hospital has done something rare and worth our applause.

A report by the National Audit Office found many malpractices in hospitals and the distributing process of drugs. The report said medical costs had been driven high by all these malpractices and that intervention may be necessary.

Obviously, it is a common opinion that more supervision is necessary to maintain cost of medical services at a reasonable level. Making the real costs for these services public is an essential part of supervision. Publicizing costs would also help protect the public's right to know.

(China Daily 08/04/2007 page4)