The Healthcare System in China - A First-Hand Report And Warning

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I hope the author isn’t from China because publishing that is literally a death sentence.

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No, he lives in the US. His experience with China's healthcare system was in adopting a child from China.

One of the most important points he makes in all this is in explaining how real-world practice of government-run healthcare works and why.

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Then, my wife and I had to rush our newly adopted, 8-month-old daughter to the public hospital…and suddenly it all started making sense.

As we stepped in more urine, took our number from the print-out machine, walked past the line of children whining and crying from the scalp IVs in their heads, then rushed to clean up blood and mucus (left by the last patient) on the plastic table they were now laying our baby on, then waited on the ONE overworked doctor (attending to no less than three hundred people) try to round up a basic anti-biotic to administer to my daughter (right there on site – no refills) it dawned on me what I was seeing and what I had been seeing this whole time. I wasn’t watching a “backward” culture or a third-world society. These people weren’t genetically inferior to first-worlders. They weren’t “less-evolved” than I was.

I was witnessing the kind of maximum, almost brutal efficiency a society must develop when the state is the master and the individual is merely a subject. Why would a Communist country not have an effective FDA? Because who are you going to complain to if you get tainted food? The government? They don’t answer to you. The press? They are owned by the government. And again, they don’t answer to you.

So what if you don’t like the conditions in the hospital? Where else are you going to go? This hospital is the last (and only) stop. You can’t opt for another place and then just pay out of your own pocket. The government has capped financial upward mobility. There is now “income equality.” And that means nobody has the means to buy their way into a different (or better) situation. And even if you could, one doesn’t exist. The state provides it all. You’re stuck.

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Emphasis added is mine. A little later on he really nails it...

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And he has ignited the debate over “single payer” healthcare. And that notion always seems to be reasonable on the surface. Why not just streamline the whole thing? Why not get the bloated insurance companies out of it? Why not eliminate the greed and corporate bureaucracy from our health?

That all sounds very reasonable.

But here’s the thing …

Single payer also means single buyer. That means the dynamics of the market get eliminated. One of the natural checks-and-balances of finding a hot-shot surgeon willing to do the risky procedure or even just seek a second opinion, get chopped away little by little. Because now we’re answering to the government. It isn’t answering to us. After all, where are we gonna go? They’ve got us. And our cancer treatment or skin graft surgery or kidney stone blast is up to their red tape. Sure, we can get in the door for free. But we might die in there, waiting on someone with no incentive and who faces no recourse, to change our plasma bag.

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And there it is. The reason a single-payer system fails is because the Socialism aspect of it changes the dynamic from the system answering to the customer (and thus needing to be more responsive) to the customer answering to the system.

My brother and his family live in China. They leave the country for most medical care.

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And there it is. The reason a single-payer system fails is because the Socialism aspect of it changes the dynamic from the system answering to the customer (and thus needing to be more responsive) to the customer answering to the system.

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I agree totally with everything in the article and your comments. It was a well-written and informative piece.

It's going to be hilarious in a "Joker-like" manner once the USA itself votes this kind of thing into power.