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This is what happens when you privatize healthcare. China, a case study.

Article: Analysis: Chinese healthcare gap widens. | AccessMyLibrary - Promoting library advocacy

Quote:

Byline: OLGA PIERCE

WASHINGTON, April 10 (UPI) -- Pressing healthcare problems are on the rise just as the Chinese healthcare system is reaching its weakest point in recent history, experts said Tuesday.

The country's ability to shore up its healthcare safety net could have a dramatic impact on China and the rest of the world.

"The current Chinese system has all the downsides of an almost unregulated market in the presence of considerable poverty," said David Blumenthal, director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"That makes the expenses people have to pay tremendously damaging to the health and economic health of the country," he told United Press International.

After decades of significant health and life-expectancy gains, the Chinese government has effectively dismantled its system of universal basic care. In its place is a market-based system where roughly half of urban dwellers have employer-based coverage. Rural areas have been largely left behind: about four in five rural Chinese are uninsured.

For the uninsured in China, access to healthcare is nowhere near guaranteed. Healthcare costs are 40 times higher than they were in the early 1980s, but 58 percent is financed by individual out-of-pocket payments.

Quote:

The barefoot doctor system was abolished in 1981 with the end of the commune system of agricultural cooperatives. The new economic policy in China promoted a shift from collectivism to individual production by the family unit.[3] This shift caused a privatization of the medical system, which could not sustain the barefoot doctors.[3] The barefoot doctors were given the option to take a national exam, if they passed they became village doctors, if not they would be village health aides. Village doctors began charging patients for their services,[3] and because of the new economic incentives,[1] they began to shift their focus to treatment of chronic conditions rather than preventative care.[1]

By 1984, village RCMS coverage had dropped from 90% to 4.8%.[2] In 1989 the Chinese government tried to restore a cooperative health care system in the rural provinces by launching a nationwide primary health care program.[2] This effort increased coverage up to 10% by 1993.[2] In 1994 the government established “The Program”, which was an effort to reestablish primary health care coverage for the rural population.[2]]

Going from 90% coverage to 4.8% coverage for the rural poor and bankrupting them in the process, absolutely ridiculous.

Because of the failures of the market based system, China is looking forward to going back to a universal healthcare model that they used to have.