Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
What is it? The BIOSECURE Act is a bill seeks to stop firms that receive federal funds from using select Chinese service companies. These include the genomics firms BGI, MGI, and Complete Genomics; and WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics. These firms are deemed by the bill as foreign “companies of concern”. Why does it matter?…
That is the title of an important paper by Jonathan Gruber, Mengyun Lin & Junjian Yi. The abstract is below: The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) rolled out in China from 2003-2008 provided insurance to 800 million rural Chinese. We combine aggregate mortality data with individual survey data, and identify the impact of the NCMS…
Back in 1960, life expectancy in the US was 69.7 years as compared to 43.7 years. At the turn of the century, this gap had closed to 76.8 to 71.4 years. As of 2021, however, US life expectancy was 76.1 whereas life expectancy in China was 77.1, a full year ahead of the U.S. Part…
One can expect health care spending in China to grow for two reasons in the coming years. First, with the economy growing, individuals and the government will have more money to spend on health care. Second, China is aging rapidly and older individuals require more health care services. Thus, it should come as no surprise…
An interesting article from Longreads on dealing with a grandmother’s terminal illness in China. Guo Zhen didn’t know she had cancer, and my family had carefully devised a strategy to keep it that way. Doctors and nurses in the hospital had been instructed to never speak of her illness in her presence, and visitors to…
Although China has the world’s largest economy, the average individual is actually fairly poor. Average incomes in the country are less than $15,000 per year, ranking #121 in the world. However, a vast majority of Chinese have health insurance due to some recent reforms. A paper by Zhang et al. (2016) uses data from the 2011-2012 China…
In 2003, China introduced the New Cooperative Medical Scheme(NCMS), a health insurance scheme for the rural population. What is the NCMS? Hou et al. (2014) describe the NMCS as follows: As a voluntary and heavily subsidized scheme, it has seen extremely rapid growth of coverage in comparison with most new schemes in developing countries. By the…
What is health insurance like in China? A 2011 paper by Zhong in Health Economics provides a nice overview, which I discuss in today’s post. Between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, three primary insurance schemes covered almost all Chinese citizens. Cooperative Medical System (CMS). This program existed in 90% of Chinese villages. …
“There is no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” – President Obama. Although some experts believe that President Obama’s stimulus package (i.e., the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) helped stave off a recession, others believe it was mostly wasteful. What many people do not realize is that China too had its own economic stimulus…
China standard is living as funds from export industries eventually trickle down into the earnings of (some) ordinary Chinese. Where are the Chinese spending their newfound wealth? In part, the answer is self-beautification procedures. According to the Economist: “China performs more cosmetic surgery than any country except America and Brazil. Almost 1.3m licensed procedures were…