[esrauch]

The healthcare thing doesn't jive with what I've heard from my native Chinese friends; I've heard if you have the right connections (and by association, wealth) you can get exactly what you need, but without that you can't get anything.

[HeavenFox]

On the contrary, I believe most people will be better off with the Chinese healthcare system than the U.S. one, because nobody go bankrupt from going to the doctor. Office visit cost at most $20 - that's without insurance. Every thing has a fixed price, so you will never get a surprise bill afterwards. If you insist on visiting the best doctor in the field, wait time can be long; but otherwise you can walk into the hospital and be seen pretty quickly. Meanwhile, in the U.S., I have good health insurance through my employer, yet I am still terrified of going to the doctors, especially, god forbid, the ER.

As for quality of care, obviously the facilities in the U.S. are nicer - they better be, you are paying 10x - 100x for that! For the treatment, most friends of mine from China complain the doctors in the U.S. don't do anything; they just give you some advil and send you home. However, antibiotics are probably prescribed too liberally in China, and IV injections used too much.

Of course there are some drawbacks too. First, the flip side of "no surprise bill" is everything is due upfront, so it's not unheard of that critical treatment is delayed because the patient is trying to find money. Second, since healthcare is so cheap, people usually don't carry health insurance other than the government provided one, which has a maximum payout amount per year. As a result, if you get rare / serious condition you can still get ruined financially. Nowadays more and more people begin to purchase commercial health insurance - which are still an order of magnitude cheaper than the U.S. ones.

[_AzMoo]

Nobody will go bankrupt from going to the doctor, but no doctor will see you without cash-up-front. As a person coming from a western country with universal healthcare, it was very confronting navigating the Chinese hospital system. Every time we needed something we were first directed to an administrator who would take payment. eg, payment for initial consult, then payment for ultrasound, then payment for pharmacy services, etc.

[thu2111]

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I felt kind of misled by your post by the time I finished reading it.

US healthcare is notorious for its problems so I was ready to believe your initial statement. But actually you say:

1. "Nobody goes bankrupt from going to the doctor", but "if you get rare / serious condition you can still get ruined financially". Those two statements are direct contradictions of each other.

2. "you can walk into the hospital and be seen pretty quickly" but also ... "it's not unheard of that critical treatment is delayed because the patient is trying to find money". Again, being seen pretty quickly and not being seen because you're trying to find money are in direct conflict.

Nowadays more and more people begin to purchase commercial health insurance - which are still an order of magnitude cheaper than the U.S. ones

Everything in China is cheaper than in the US. It's still a poor country.

Honestly both systems sound just as bad as each other, or rather, the Chinese system sounds far worse. I'd rather be alive and bankrupt, rather than refused treatment entirely, because I didn't have the cash at the exact moment I fell ill or there was some SNAFU with payment systems.

If more and more people choose to buy health insurance, that sounds like China is well on the way to a US style model as it develops.

[philliphaydon]

I see on the internet, especially on reddit, where there's praise for healthcare in china. But I've never spoke to a person from china who likes it. But I've heard lots of horror stories.

I wouldn't want to end up in hospital in the US or china. Think the only countries I would feel at ease in are Singapore and Taiwan.

[elliekelly]

I can’t speak to healthcare generally but one of my college roommates was from China and she just could not wrap her head around the politicization of birth control in the US. I remember her asking us if Americans thought it was dangerous or addictive because she couldn’t understand why it was so controversial that the affordable care act required birth control to be covered.

[schoen]

A sibling comment has already mentioned the one-child issue, but I wanted to say... Chinese culture is so deeply different from American culture about all sorts of things about reproduction and fertility.

Chinese people's attitudes toward the one-child policy and also sex-selective abortion are complicated and varied, but they don't seem very similar to Americans' attitudes at all!

In the U.S. it's common for people's religions to completely formally proscribe some forms of birth control and/or abortion. This has led to a big political debate about what the scope of their legal rights to avoid subsidizing these things for other people should be. It's not surprising that that debate should exist, but also not surprising that it would be uncommon in China where (1) the most practiced religions largely don't have these teachings and (2) people don't have a common expectation that the state will give their religious practices and beliefs a considerable amount of deference.

[schoen]

I want to add:

I think a median American attitude is that nobody else should pressure you to have more or fewer children than you want to; if your religion encourages you to have children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that, and in modern times, if you just don't want children, other people are also largely supposed to respect that. (In blue tribe environments having many children is suspicious and in red tribe environments having no children is suspicious, but in both cases people are increasingly effective at pushing back socially against other people's scrutiny about this, and even at pushing back against their own families' judgments or preferences.) (These considerations don't necessarily apply the same way outside of opposite-sex monogamous married couples.)

I don't think these norms are common in the same way in China or in Chinese cultures elsewhere. In particular, I think even if Chinese people don't all think their parents, or governments, should get to decide how many children they have, it doesn't seem like many will reach U.S. levels of offense that prospective childbearing couples' parents, or governments, have an expressed preference and actively try to influence this.

[i_am_proteus]

The PRC perspective on birth control, specifically, is unique, since the CCP forced birth control and abortion on its population for decades as part of the "one child" policy.[0]

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy