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A dormitory building in Taifu Town Middle School [Photo/Shanghai Daily]

An autopsy is being conducted on a middle school student alleged to have fallen to his death on Saturday, with no evidence having been found so far to suggest he was physically abused, officials in Luzhou, Sichuan province, said at a news conference on Thursday.

He Shaopeng, deputy mayor and public security bureau director of Luzhou, said the chest and belly of the student’s body had been cut open and lacerations were found in his liver and spleen.

The publicity department of Luxian－a county under the administration of Luzhou－said on Wednesday that a 14-year-old male student of Taifu Middle School in Taifu town was found dead outside his dormitory building at about 6 a.m. on Saturday.

The department stated that local police did not think the boy had been murdered after initial investigations, but this caused public outcry, with many people suspecting that the boy was beaten to death by five other students who are children of local officials.

Mao Handong, a police officer with Luzhou public security bureau, said at the conference that none of the officials’ children were proved to have been classmates with, or to have known of, the deceased student.

Lyu Yugang, director of the Ministry of Education’s basic education department, said at a conference in Beijing on Thursday that he felt sorry for the death of the student and had requested education departments in Sichuan to assist local authorities in discovering the cause of the student’s death and reporting to the ministry in a timely manner.

A video obtained by Lyu Qingfu, a reporter at Xinhua News Agency, showed the mother of the deceased student visiting a crematory and cutting clothes off her son’s body to expose a large purple area on his back and wounds on both hands and elbows, suggesting that the boy might have been beaten to death.

People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, said in an opinion piece on its WeChat account on Wednesday that local governments should release information in a timely and accurately manner in emergency situations.

“Timely and accurate information, as well as an authoritative and convincing autopsy report, will help clarify facts and dispel rumors,” it said.

Beijing will put a new medical care reform plan into effect on Saturday, which will bring an end to medicine price markups, according to local officials.

More than 3,600 medical institutions are involved in the reform and all of them will abolish the medicine price markups, according to Fang Laiying, head of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Health and Family Planning.

It is estimated that the cost of treatment per outpatient will be reduced by about 5 percent on average thanks to cuts in medicine prices, while there will be an average cost increase of 2.5 percent for inpatient treatment due to the growth of certain service charges, according to Fang.

Community hospitals and medical institutions will be given the same access to the medicines usually prescribed in higher-level hospitals, so that patients will have more choices, Fang said.

Marking up medicine prices is a practice that has been adopted by most public hospitals in China since the 1950s. It allows hospitals to sell drugs with markups usually at a rate of 15 percent above the drugs’ tag prices.

Its purpose was to make up for the shortage in healthcare funding from the government, and it became part of doctors’ salaries, creating incentive for doctors to over-prescribe.

In 2015, incomes from checkups, tests and medical treatment materials accounted for about 66 percent of the city’s medical services revenue, while the incomes from the intelligence and labor of medical personnel, such as diagnosis, surgery, treatment and nursing, which are closely related to the quality of medical services, only accounted for 34 percent, according to Fang.

“The core of this new reform is to separate the functions of medical services and drug sales so as to shut down the markup mechanism in public medical institutions in Beijing,” Fang said.

“The separation will cut off the channel for making money through over-prescription and help medical practitioners provide better treatments and other services,” Fang said.

“The reform will effectively motivate the medical staff to pay more attention to the medical service they are providing, and further improve the doctor-patient relationship,” said Li Ruifeng, a medical reform expert from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine.