Although China’s government has promised that by 2010, basic medical and health care will cover all rural residents, if someone becomes seriously ill and can’t afford medical care, he or she is out of luck.
Under this proposed basic medical system, subscribers will be funded at a level of fifty yuan per person (twenty yuan from the central government, twenty from the local government and ten from the individual).
Chinese peasant
Rural health care in China has become a challenge. For many peasants in rural areas, this could mean as much as ten percent or more of their annual income would have to go toward basic health care insurance. The rural people do not have a choice. The government will force everyone to pay his or her share.
The focus in China is on prevention—meaning to plan your lifestyle around healthy habits. That’s why early in the morning you may find many older Chinese outside exercising using the graceful, poetic movements of Tai Chi to insure health and longevity.
How could obesity not be a problem since the Chinese are having a love affair with American fast food? China loves most things American. McDonalds and Domino’s Pizza are considered gourmet restaurants and can easily be found in China’s cities.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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The health care system built under Mao’s leadership no longer exists. Doctors and nurses are trained the same as in the United States. Since Mao’s death, in one of the greatest policy reversals of modern times, China dissolved free medical care in its rural communities, privatized vast areas of the economy and shifted public-health resources toward the cities. Socialized medicine vanished.
President Ronald Reagan
President Ronald Reagan’s administration seems to have been the role model for these changes. During Reagan’s years, the U.S. saw a steep rise in the for-profit sector in medicine, in particular the for-profit hospital chains.
Other Republican presidents like the first George Bush continued this rush toward a for-profit, free market approach to health care. What has happened in the United States is starting to happen in China. There is no room for the poor and uninsured and uninsurable beyond what is considered basic services like blood pressure tests and taking your temperature along with a bit of advice.
If you don’t have the money or a health plan linked to retirement, you face a death sentence. And like America, everyone working for the government (elected or not) has the best health care.
After the Communists won China in 1949, health care improved. Prior to that, life expectancy for the Chinese people was thirty-five years. By Mao’s death in 1976, average life expectancy had increased by twenty years.
There were three basic areas of medical care. Free substandard medical care was provided to the proletarian working class, meaning workers and peasants.
Mao started a program called ‘bare-foot doctors’. This program was the backbone of rural health care in China. This meant anyone could become a doctor.
Video: Documentary of Bare-Foot Doctors in China
Mao told the people that if you wanted to be a doctor, you didn’t need to go to medical school. All you had to do was have the motivation to provide medical care to needy people and the government would support you and provide limited training.
The second class of medical care went to people like teachers, clerks and secretaries, ‘friends’ of the working class, the proletariat. The only difference was that these ‘friends’ had to pay to get medical treatment. It was possible to face financial ruin from one hospital stay.
The third class were termed enemies of the proletariat like former shop-owners, landlords and denounced intellectuals like liberal arts professors. These people were denied treatment altogether.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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I’ve heard and read that the United States has the greatest government on the earth.
I disagree.
It’s true that America is the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet. But the most important difference is that the United States has a “Bill of Rights“ designed to protect the citizens from government abuse. Remove the “Bill of Rights” and what do we have—a government that will get carried away with unrestricted powers like so many have in the past.
The Founding Father’s (at least the key players) understood that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. King George taught them that, so they developed a structure to limit that corruption so it would not spill over and hurt the citizens.
The sad thing is that the “Bill of Rights” doesn’t protect citizens from street gangs and drug dealers and all the other crazy things that go on in a country with the largest prison population on the planet. China has the second largest prison population and that is about half of those locked up in America while China has four times the population.
And many ignorant people in the United States believe China is a bad place to live because of a government with the word “Communist” in front of it. Words are words. There is little difference between the word Democrat (8 letters), Communist (9 letters) and Republican (10 letters).
I’m weighing in on the health care debate. I’m an impartial observer, because I already have socialized medicine through the VA. Serving in Vietnamearned me that benefit, and the VA works betterthan most systems.
VA Medical Facility, San Francisco
We can learn from history if we pay attention. In 141 B.C.E., a new Han emperor sat on the Dragon Throne in China. His name was Wudi. He ruled for fifty-four years. Wudi believed that all people should have the right to buy certain commodities essential to survival and they should not be included in the free-market system. He implemented government monopolies in certain critical areas like salt, alcohol and iron. Prices were controlled so everyone paid the same low price.
After his death, a national debate known as the “Debate on Salt and Iron” took place. The government monopolies were abolished, and the poor could no longer afford many essentials. The rich grew wealthier. Soon after that, the Han Dynasty entered a period of stagnation like what is taking place in America today, and the Han Dynasty eventually collapsed.
What could we learn from what happened in China during the Han Dynasty?
Isn’t health care a commodity essential to survival?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar
I’m taking a break from serious subjects for this post.
The Chinese invented tofu. Americans are reinventing it. I was introduced to Chocolate Tofu Pie at Mother’s Market in Costa Mesa, California. Then I figured out how to make it at home by experimenting.
Ingredients:
Two 10-ounce containers of soft or silken organic tofu
Two four-ounce packages of baker’s, unsweetened chocolate—but use only six of the ounces. This chocolate has no milk or sweeteners added. Use six ounces of the eight.
One bag of malt-sweetened chocolate bits. There are no dairy or refined sugars in this chocolate. Use half of this bag. If you skip this ingredient, add more of the baker’s, unsweetened chocolate.
Agave nectar. This low absorbing sweetener is absorbed into the body slowly.
One package of readymade whole-wheat piecrust (recommended for fiber).
Use one tablespoon of arrowroot for a thickener
Directions:
Mix the tofu in a blender with the arrowroot or another natural thickener.
Heat the chocolate in a pan (double boiler hopefully) until melted and pour into blended tofu and mix.
Add the Agave nectar.
Taste to make sure it is sweet enough and that the bitterness from the baker’s chocolate is gone. Add more Agave if desired. Our daughter enjoys this step the most, since she is the taster.
Blend until it is all one smooth color.
Pour equally into the pie pans.
Put pies in oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
Let pies cool after cooking; put in refrigerator after they are cool.
The pies will be ready the next day.
I shop at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s
See more about Tofu
China was making tofu from soybeans more than two thousand years ago. But mention it to most Americans and it is “yuk” time. American prejudices for tofu are so strong, most will not taste a morsel. Horror fills faces and complexions turn green.
That’s why we never mention to the beefy McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC, cancer and heart attack generations that eat at our house that the ice cream we serve is made from tofu or the chocolate pie is made from tofu or that …
They never know the difference. We reveal the truth after they eat and offer praise. Got the idea?
In China, I get up early to go the the nearest market that makes fresh soy juice and I buy it without sugar or sweetener added. There is no comparison. It’s warm. It’s fresh. It’s China. It’s different from the genetically altered, American, factory-farmed soy juice sold in American markets. That stuff is “yuk” and I don’t touch it.
There are thousands of foods that humans eat. Most Americans eat about a half dozen. Maybe soy and tofu is the secret explaining why there are more than 1.3 billion Chinese.
I read at Crooked Timber that three Google executives were convicted of violating Italy’s privacy laws. That taught me that China is not alone in having laws different from other countries that limit activity on the Internet.
When China censors the Internet, or hires mothers to go after on-line pornographers, the family centered culture drives those actions. Most of China’s arrests of dissidents and executions of criminals are also driven by the family centered culture influenced by Confucian, Taoist beliefs.
Confucious
A few years back, a Japanese citizen, wife and mother attempted suicide in the United States and killed her children in the attempt, but the mother was saved by bystanders. She tried to kill herself and her children, because she had lost face when it was discovered that her husband had an affair with another woman.
When the American legal system was going to try her for murder, the Japanese government protested and said her actions were driven by her culture. Respecting the differences between the two cultures, the United States allowed her to return to Japan.
If we really respect the differences between cultures, why does the Western media and American politicians go out of their way to treat China without respecting the cultural differences that explains why China’s government acts the way it does?
To understand China more, I recommend reading piety, face and heroes.
From Business Insider, comes 15 Facts (actually 17) About China that will Blow Your Mind. Here are five of them. Visit Business Insider to see the rest and the details.
1. By 2025, China will build TEN New York-sized cities.
Shanghai river waterfront
2. China already consumes twice as much steel as the US, Europe and Japan combined.
3. If the Chinese, one day, use as much oil per person as America, then the world will need seven more Saudi Arabias to meet the demand.
Note: Another reason why China NEEDS to go Green with their power. See my piece about this topic at China Going Green. The growing crises with industrial pollution linked to oil is another reason.
4. Chinese Internet users are five times as likely to have blogs as Americans.
5. Chinese GDP (Gross Domestic Product) could overtake the U.S. as soon as the early 2020s.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse 
