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4 years agoChina has universal healthcare and most medical resources are publicly owned. Access to medical resources varies greatly and coverage isn’t perfect in rural areas but you can see a doctor and get a prescription for less than $10 almost everywhere in the country. If you get Covid the state will pay for 100% of your hospital stay and use every available resource to keep you alive, even if it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The US is decades away from that level of coverage.
Every urban Chinese resident was guaranteed housing up to around 2000 and every rural Chinese resident is still guaranteed a plot of arable land. China’s not a social democracy and the way it addresses poverty is fundamentally different from social democracies.
Yes, I recognize that there’s inequality within China and a strong urban-rural divide, that’s a valid criticism but I’m not hearing much of a solution. The current healthcare system is far, far superior to healthcare under the planned economy that dominated the country up until the 90s, so it’s not a reflection of unequal distribution of resources by the market. Both urban and rural healthcare has drastically improved within the last 20 years, market reforms are what made universal healthcare possible.
An urbanized, coastal metropolis like Shanghai is going to have better services than a remote mountainous village in Yunnan. That’s true of every country and economy in the world, it was true of China during the planned economy era and it’s true today. It’s much more helpful to compare current rural healthcare access to rural healthcare access 20 or 50 years ago rather than urban healthcare access today.