Friday, January 20, 2006

Socialized Health Care Dying in China and England

California Lawmakers are still talking about embracing socialized health care for Californians in spite of the failures seen in other countries where such a system is used.

A recent NY Times article 79% of the people of China have no health insurance. The article also describes how terrible health care conditions are in rural and poor areas in China.
Even the official Chinese news media are regularly filled with accounts of the desperate choices people are forced to make over health care, of brothers who must draw lots to see whose serious disease will be treated because their family cannot afford to treat both, or of a father who sells a kidney to treat an ill son.

"There's basically no safety net at all for medical care in the village I live in," said Yang Yunbiao, a worker with a Chinese independent organization in Fuyang that aids poor sick people. "Our village has a lot of aged people with disease who are unable to get treatment, just staying at home in bed with barely enough to eat. They are shut in and can't work, and their disease and poverty have taken away their dignity."


According to The Times of London many hospitals have been closing wards in England this week because they cannot afford to keep them open. Is this the type of health system we want for California?

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