February 21, 2005
Barefoot doctor...
One of the commonplaces of modern life is being told by liberals how superior the medical systems are in Cuba or China or Canada or Britain or Scandinavia...you've heard the stuff. However, if you keep your eyes and ears open you will also encounter bits and pieces of information that tell you that it just isn't so.
Those bits and pieces aren't much use in an argument. But recently someone had the perfect crushing retort. A Nobel Prize-winning jackass was pontificating on the great strides made in medicine during the Cultural Revolution...and....
...But, alas, there was someone in the audience who actually had lived through the Cultural Revolution in China, and had been one of Mao's "barefoot doctors." He didn't see things quite the same way as Mr. Sen. In fact, he said the comments had quite surprised him.
"I observed with my own eyes the total absence of medicine in some parts of China. The system was totally unsustainable. We used to admire India," said Weijian Shan, now a banker in Hong Kong. Mr. Shan then added an anecdote that tickled the audience, telling how when he first visited Taiwan in the 1980s and saw young medical school graduates serving in the countryside, he thought to himself, "China ought to copy Taiwan."
Mr. Shan added, about Mao's medicine, "If they had made the system optional, nobody would have opted for it."...
This is from a piece in OpinionJournal, entitled An 'Annie Hall' Moment. (The perfect title. Click on the link if you don't get it.)
Posted by John Weidner at February 21, 2005 01:46 PMJust as a side note, it requires you to sign in today, but tomorrow there will be no registration screen whatsoever.
Posted by: B. Durbin at February 21, 2005 02:38 PMWhy am I not surprized the story concerns China...Depending on what you think a national health system should be doing or be able to do, one can certainly make an argument others do it better than we do, but I've never seen or heard anyone, liberal or otherwise, claim Red China's system was better than our!! Where have you ever seen that? Perhaps, maybe, better than what China had BEFORE Mao, but never better than our system.
On the other had, we could look at the Scandinavian system - every citizen is 100% covered for everything, and according to OECD data, it costs them about $2900-3600 per capita. Meanwhile, here is the US of A with 40-45 million uninsured, tens of millions more underinsured, millions fearful they could lose their health insurance, yet total medical cost in the US stands at almost $9,000 per capita!
They sure can claim to be getting more for their money than we do...
