It was privatised back in the 80s.
By 2000s they reformed and created government owned health insurance. Nowadays healthcare is cheap but not free but they have come a long way. Even in 2000, China was considered poor. They were paying in Yuan for drugs and medical equipment imported from overseas. Now the country can afford it. 20 years ago it was a very different story.
I am pretty sure Xi has explicitly tackled the topic off welfarism, look it up. It’s a controversial topic for many western leftists that confuse socialism with free stuff, China stance is to develop a common prosperity through the development of quality productive forces through education and infrastructure, from the historical experience off the USSR, other perished states and some ongoing ones, like Spain, they see welfarism as a dangerous path that could breed lazyness and conformism, wrong or not i think China is doing pretty well so far. In other words, they’re investing in better safety nets than free services.
Still afaik medicine is dirt cheap so it’s not like it is a huge problem.
Do you have a source where Xi says that having free healthcare or welfare makes people lazy?
To realize common prosperity, we should adhere to the following principles: Encouraging hard work and innovation. Happiness is achieved through hard work. Meanwhile, common prosperity depends on hard work and wisdom. We should safeguard and improve people’s livelihood while pursuing development, give top priority to high- quality development, create more favorable and equitable conditions for the people to receive better education and improve their development capabilities, enhance human capital and professional skills throughout society and improve people’s abilities to get employed and start a business and their competence to prosper. We should prevent the ossification of social class, shape a development environment that provides chances for more people to become wealthy and avoid “involution” and “lying flat.” Adhering to the basic economic system. As China is still in the primary stage of socialism, we must work unswervingly to both consolidate and develop the public sector and encourage, support and guide the development of the nonpublic sector. We must uphold the dominant role of the public sector and common development of economic entities under diverse forms of ownership, exert the important role of the public sector in promoting common prosperity and promote healthy growth of the nonpublic sector of the economy and workers in the sector. We should allow a portion of people to become rich first, encourage them to help those still lagging behind and focus on encouraging entrepreneurial individuals who work hard, engage in lawful operations and have the courage to start their own businesses. We do not advocate becoming rich through side doors, and we will deal with violations in accordance with the law. Doing everything within our capacity. A scientific public policy system should be established to make the “cake” bigger and form a pattern of equitable distribution for all. Efforts should be intensified, and more practical measures should be taken to enable the masses to have a greater sense of gain. Meanwhile, we must recognize that the development level of our country still lags far behind that of developed countries. We plan by considering both needs and possibilities and improve people’s well-being based on economic development and financial sustainability. We should not aim too high and make promises that cannot be fulfilled. Instead of taking on everything, the government should focus on carrying out programs that are general, inclusive and guarantee basic needs. Even if we become more developed and financially stronger in the future, we should not set excessively high goals and provide excessive guarantees, in order not to fall into the trap of “welfarism” that encourages laziness.
Thanks for sharing, this was an insightful read.
Should look up the complete speech, you could google it by using some lines from this extract.
In typical marxist fashion it’s very reiterative but it gets the point across, China is in a primary stage of socialism and is not in a position to make grandiose promises, could you imagine free healthcare in a 1.4 billion population nation?, because it might not be able to fulfill them.
I have finished reading the whole speech!
It’s difficult to imagine what it’s like to manage so many people, but I can see why CPC has such high approval rating compared to our governments. I can also see the consequences of our style of leadership that’s been reflected in our societies and it’s very disturbing, to say the least.
I’ve looked into this before and the average health insurance is like 10-20 dollars a month - when you consider other socialized health systems like the UK is still paid for with tax from workers in part (national insurance) it doesn’t seem that bad honestly.
Consider the life expectancy of most Chinese people is really old, their health care system is working it seems.
Edit -
Quickly reviewing this China has basically the same system in the UK - workers pay 2% of their monthly income and the employer covers the rest.
UK National insurance is only 2% on earnings above ~£45k. For most of the population, since median salary is ~£39k, the national insurance rate is more like 8%, which comes to about £100-250 a month depending on where you are within that tax bracket.
From my discussions with some Chinese people, it’s that the government found that it wasn’t able to adequately meet the needs of the people without taking up a ton of the state’s budget (biggest population) causing issues like inflexibility from planning, so they opened it up to the market, but still under the watch of the state. Like others have said, their insurance is and medical care is very inexpensive compared to western countries, so it’s not a big problem.
As far as I know, this is one of the major issues currently faced in China. I don’t know if they had to privatize their healthcare.
I’m still doing study on China I only have a basic understanding of it. Deng isn’t without his flaws, he seemed to have had a bit of an infatuation with Singapore’s Development, also, and LKY and while I don’t know the details, the situation with healthcare seems to confirm there may have indeed been major flaws?
It’s honestly quite challenging subject to study. Like have you heard of the Birdcage economy model? The “Mastermind” behind that was the Central Advisory Commission (CAC) under the leadership of Chen Yun
Maybe I’m wrong here, but it seems to me like history tends to have a tendency to over-correct itself sometimes.
Maybe someone else has better information on healthcare specifically so I will stop here.
It used to be before Deng. But I’m not that informed on this subject, so I’ll leave it at that.
If the state is the people then the cost is borne somehow by the people. China’s method is to to deflate the cost of living by reducing the cost of production and services at every possible aspect (think for example getting to hospital and getting reviewed by a specialist - like the whole journey - and think about every single cost involved in that journey: the transportation, the power/energy poduction, all the professionals (the cost of their education and their living expenses), infrastructure, mineral and material supply chains, pharmaceutics etc)
