China Monday unveiled a blueprint for health-care over the next decade, kicking off a much-anticipated reform to fix the ailing medical system and to ensure fair and affordable health services for all 1.3 billion citizens.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council, or China's Cabinet, jointly endorsed and issued the Guidelines on Deepening the Reform of Health-care System after about three years of intense debate and repeated revision.

By 2020, the world's most populous country will have a basic health-care system that can provide "safe, effective, convenient and affordable" health services to urban and rural residents, according to the tone-setting document.

This will be supplemented by a more detailed implementation plan for the three years until 2011. The plan has yet to be published, but the State Council announced earlier this year an investment plan of 850 billion yuan ($124 billion) for the reform in three years.

The core principle of the reform is to provide basic health care as a "public service" to the people, which requires much more government funding and supervision.

The document said the government role in "formulating policies and plans, raising funds, providing service, and supervising" must be strengthened in order to ensure the fairness and equity of the service.

"This is the first time that basic medical services in China are clearly defined as a public service for all citizens, which is part of essential rights of the people," said Professor Li Ling, of Peking University.

The reform is aimed at "solving pressing problems that have caused strong complaints from the public," the document said, referring to long-standing criticism that medical services are difficult to access and increasingly unaffordable.

Many factors were blamed for causing problems--huge development gap between cities and rural areas, low government funding, weak health-care facilities at grassroots level, and increasing disease burdens--despite the country's effort to double the average life expectancy over the past 60 years.

Soaring medical bills further strained China's social security network, already burdened by expensive education, fast population ageing and unemployment. This forces many ordinary Chinese to save money, instead of spending, as precautionary measures.

"Government's decision to spend more on public sectors such as health care comes at a crucial moment as the country strides to expand domestic markets to offset negative impacts from global economic downturn," said Prof. Zhao Xijun, of the Renmin University of China.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, governments covered more than 90 percent of medical expenses for urban residents, while rural people enjoyed simple but essentially free health care.

But when China began its economic reforms in the early 1980s, the system was dismantled as the country attempted to switch to a market-oriented health care system.