1.The National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) officially came into being. On March 10, 2013, the plan on institutional restructuring and functional transformation of the State Council was made open. It was proposed that a national health and family planning commission would be set up by merging the former Ministry of Health and the National Population and Family Planning Commission, integrating the responsibilities of the former and the administration and service-provision responsibilities of the latter. In the institutional restructuring, the functional transformation was highlighted and more attention was paid to the macro-administration, administration in accordance with the law, overall supervision and optimization of resource allocation, and mutual complementation of health services and family planning services. On March 16, the First Session of the 12th National People's Congress appointed Li Bin as the commissioner of the NHFPC. On March 17, the NHFPC held the first staff meeting. Liu Yandong, vice premier of the State Council, delivered an important speech in which she stressed that the Second Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the CPC and the decisions made in the First Session of the 12th National People's Congress must be carried out. All work related to institutional restructuring of the health and family planning sectors had to be done in a down-to-earth manner by focusing on functional transformation.

On June 18, the NHFPC promulgated a document that defined the major responsibilities, internal bodies and staffing of the NHFPC. It removed 10 responsibilities related to administrative approval and appraisal; integrated and strengthened seven responsibilities related to the deepening of health reform; and set up the Department of Health System Reform, which would take over the responsibilities of the Leading Group Office of Deepening Healthcare System Reform previously under the State Council.

2. The Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council developed comprehensive plans for deepening health care reform. On November 12, 2013, the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Some Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening Reform, in which it made clear that efforts should be made to deepen health care reform; to proceed with a comprehensive reform in health insurance, medical care, public health, and the medicine supply and regulatory system; to deepen the comprehensive reform of primary care institutions; to accelerate the reform of public hospitals; to abolish the markup policy of drug sales to make up for the shortage ofhospital funds; to extend the universal coverage of health insurance; and to encourage private funds to flow to medical services.