What do you get with the booming economy in China? You get an enormous growth of population according to the National Population and Family Planning Commission. This means an increase in the need for food, the need for fuel and everything in between, including health care.China’s population growth is the fastest growth in human history. According to the Population Census Bureau, it is possible that India will catch up.

In China, to curb its population growth, a controversial family planning policy was implemented in the late 1970s. It is meant to limit urban couples to one child and rural families to two. However, with the emergence of a middle class in China, couples are now able to afford the fines to increase the size of their families.
Over ten percent of the families in China have over three children. China has over 1.5 billion people and over 20% of the world’s population. One main concern for China now is the health care system. This could be good for the US economy.
China has a long history of alternative medicine; that is, a very different concept from that of western medicine. As China becomes industrialized and westernized, will disease patterns of a western nation emerge? China is enormously unprepared for this. Their hospitals are unequipped for western diagnosis and treatment and their pharmacies stocked for centuries with natural and herbal medicines.
Natural remedies are certainly a good thing, but as China is exposed to trans-fats, processed food, environmental toxins, industrial and occupational hazards and the like, natural remedies and rural trends will render ineffective cures, therapies and treatments. Chinese citizens will follow many western treatments and surgeries that have already become mainstream Standard of Care in other countries. When cancer and heart disease threaten the elderly Chinese population the younger generation will capitalize on western pharmaceuticals, equipment and of course the emergence of every aspect of business involved in long-term health care.
The Chinese government is making plans to attack the problem and acknowledge the point above. China’s Ministry of Health has been addressing chronic disease prevention and control. In 2002, it established the National Center for Chronic and Non-Communicable Disease Control and Prevention to oversee efforts at the national level; the same year, it unveiled the Disease Surveillance Points System, a national resource for chronic disease surveillance.
The ministry is also working to develop the first long-term (from 2005 to 2015) comprehensive national plan for chronic disease control and prevention in cooperation with relevant sectors and supported by the World Health Organization (WHO). Reducing adult male smoking, hypertension, overweight and obesity, and building capacity for chronic disease control are among the plan's highest priorities.
Programs targeted toward specific diseases have also increased. These efforts include a community-based intervention on management of hypertension and diabetes conducted in three cities (Beijing, Shanghai, and Changsha) between 1991 and 2000; a national cancer control plan, the Program of Cancer Prevention and Control in China; and ratification of the WHO Framework Convention of Tobacco Control. Furthermore, to prevent chronic disease at early ages, projects to improve nutrition and health status have been undertaken. These projects are focused mainly on primary schools and have achieved encouraging reductions (by as much as 30 percent in one year in one example) in the prevalence of childhood obesity.
It is evident that western health care, its systems and research will not be ignored by China. The markets are enormous and another industry exemplifies and shows the potential of the western medical markets in China. China has the largest TV audience in the world and a television show on CCTV (Chinese government sponsored TV) provides the largest audience in the world for syndication. In a controlled environment, this means astronomical income; in a black market environment, it is still going to be astronomical income.
The US already is the major supplier of medicine to Canada and it is predicted that pharmaceuticals and medical equipment suppliers are going to make out big in China over the next twenty years.