Think-tanks and academics submitted proposals to the State Council during the drafting process last year and a few meetings were held to solicit views from some carefully selected representatives of the public since April this year.

However, despite two years of waiting, the reform blueprint has yet to be made public.

Medical sector reform has been plagued by controversy on the mainland. Not only has the public been greatly dissatisfied with rising medical costs and poor standards of service, rampant corruption and bickering among government departments have also drawn public ire.

Peking University's health policy and management department professor Chen Yude said the meeting indicated that the long-awaited document would be released at last. 'It has been two years and they cannot delay it anymore.'

Health Minister Chen Zhu indicated earlier the reform blueprint would be released after the National People's Congress in March but later said it would be released this year.

Gordon Liu Guoen , chair of the department of health economics and management at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management, said the release of the draft paper had been postponed because of the Sichuan earthquake in May and the Olympic Games last month.

During the annual session of the NPC and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in March, medical practitioners expressed dismay that their views were not heard during the drafting process, with the government mainly consulting academics and international bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the World Bank.

A sticking point of the reforms is how to make public hospitals more efficient and less cash hungry, however it has been difficult to reach a consensus among the government departments.

Hospital operators were expected to resist radical changes to public hospital funding because the operators had vested interests, analysts said.

Intense bickering also took place among the 16 government ministries involved in the drafting process because each wants more government funding to be channelled to the areas they oversee.

Peking University's Dr Chen said there would not be any major surprise in the upcoming policy document, as it was an attempt to balance the interests of all ministries involved.

A Xinhua report said yesterday that health care reform would focus on five areas: introducing medical insurance coverage to all urban and rural residents as well as rural migrants in cities; providing affordable basic medicine; building community and rural clinics to provide basic health services and guarantee government funding to grass-roots health care providers; and selecting individual public hospitals to experiment with pilot reforms.

Xinhua said the pilot experiments would include better management of funding and expenditure, and increasing government funding to hospitals.

Dr Liu said the policy document was important but it might not resolve all the problems the medical profession faced.

'Health care reform is a process, it is not a one-time shot. The official document can only facilitate the process,' he said.