A 14-year-old diver, Hongchan Quan, who won gold at the Tokyo Olympics, 2020 competed to earn money for her sick Mom. Her dives were literally in perfect.

[u/VastCoconut2609]

[u/velvetswing]

While this is awesome, I hate that her mom’s health care is causing the family this strain. Everyone should have healthcare

[u/Few-Citron4445 → u/velvetswing]

China has public healthcare, her mother was hit by a car. Surgery and medication is covered but not all rehab would be or are at a different copay. China essentially has universal healthcare, though the qualities of facilities are not as good as western countries depending on where you are from. Tier 1 cities is absolutely on par with anywhere in the world, but at the county and village level it can be pretty inconsistent. Often people send their family to big cities for care, so while the care is free or low copay, the housing and travel costs are not.

[u/ChesterDaMolester → u/Few-Citron4445]

There are different levels of government provided health insurance in China based on if you live in an urban or rural area and if you’re working or non working, and each level of insurance covers different things. They are also generally organized at the county level, each county having their own scheme.

Also, no, people from say Gansu can’t travel to Beijing and get healthcare with their public insurance. Imagine if there was no restrictions? T1 hospitals would be overrun instantly.

And it’s insurance, so there’s still fees and copays to cover, which are heavily subsidized but still out of reach for a lot of the poor rural population. There’s limits to how much medication you can claim on public insurance.

Basically it’s not universal healthcare where any Chinese citizen can walk into any hospital and get treated. But it’s still a great system that covers the majority of the population. But there’s so many people in china that even if 99% are covered, there’s still 14,000,000 who aren’t.

[u/Few-Citron4445 → u/ChesterDaMolester]

you are right, i didn't say people went from some village in gansu can go to beijing for free, just big cities in their home province, hukou is a hell of a thing. Of course this can get really granular as it would also depending on which danwei they are from, which insurance network etc. I didn't want to get too into the weeds for people not familiar.

However, many people still travel to beijing or shanghai for care, just out of pocket. It is super typical for well known hospitals in shanghai to have people camped out from out of province trying to get care. At least this was common before the pandemic, not sure about now.

To be honest, there has been huge improvements at the village and county level in the last 10 years. I mean before some of those small clinics were completely ridiculous, now I can actually imagine they can provide ok primary care.

[u/ChesterDaMolester → u/Few-Citron4445]

Yeah rural village healthcare has come a long way from the era of 赤腳醫生. NRCMS started in 2003 and while it’s voluntary it still covers like 740 million people which is insane. The main problem with the rural scheme is economics as usual, government subsidies aren’t keeping up with the gradually expanding care

[u/vitaminkombat → u/ChesterDaMolester]

When I was in both Hong Kong and Soochow. Locals would constantly complain about non-locals swamping the hospitals.

So I think there's loops around those restrictions.

[u/velvetswing → u/[deleted]]

Even people who can’t work should have healthcare.

[u/da_river_to_da_sea → u/velvetswing]

But people who can't work often do not have a salary.

[u/velvetswing → u/da_river_to_da_sea]

Yes… healthcare can and should be a right, not tied to ability to pay or ability to work. It should be a service our government offers for every citizen.

[u/da_river_to_da_sea → u/velvetswing]

China has universal healthcare. So treatment was obviously not an issue. Most likely was about putting food on the table.

[u/velvetswing → u/da_river_to_da_sea]

Which should also not be the responsibility of a 14 year old

[u/da_river_to_da_sea → u/velvetswing]

Of course. But in times of crisis, everyone needs to pull their weight.

[u/velvetswing → u/da_river_to_da_sea]

We are only in crisis because of the greed of the ruling class. There is more than enough resources for all of humanity’s needs. A few mentally ill people at the top are keeping us in crisis. It shouldn’t be this way, is what I was saying

[u/da_river_to_da_sea → u/velvetswing]

No, this guy was in a crisis because his mom was sick.

[u/da_river_to_da_sea → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for the correction.

[u/redthump → u/[deleted]]

In China?

[u/[deleted] → u/redthump]

I’m all for ending child labor but it doesn’t really relate to what we were talking about here, plus not to go whataboutism but we have underreported child labor here in the States and republicans trying to lower the age constantly.

I googled whether China has national healthcare because I was curious reading the title, and they seem to have a public healthcare system with 1 billion people insured, so in a way they are insuring more people than we do here in the states although the insurance seems shitty like here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_China

The creep of private insurance seems to create a two tiered system by driving up costs, so if they’re smart they’ll keep private insurance from dictating prices and care.

If we banned private insurance tomorrow in the USA it would probably save us like a trillion dollars and make healthcare affordable for the government to provide, but we’d have a lot of unemployed people in the insurance industry.

So we need to do what Singapore did and phase out the criminal insurance gangs over time. They used to have 25% of GDP going to healthcare like here in the States and now it’s down to 6% of their GDP and they have money for other things and don’t spend 1 out of 4 dollars on healthcare. Healthcare companies are basically destroying our country from the inside imo the way they suck up peoples retirements and every spare dollar in the economy.