How’s That Socialized Medicine Working for China? | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: The author of this post is Mitch Kokai for the John Locke Foundation.

    In a Washington Examiner article primarily about Michael Bloomberg, Nick Stehle includes an interesting segment about the impact of socialized medicine.

    What is interesting, however, is that we're debating the merits of socialized medicine in our corner of the world, and over in China we're seeing the full force of it.

    There's a saying in China about the nation's socialist healthcare system-kan bing nan, kan bing gui (hard to see a doctor, expensive to see a doctor). It's not the ideal slogan as China battles a massive outbreak of the coronavirus, but as social media and news coverage of the epidemic have shown, it's an accurate one.

    Overcrowded hospitals, patients waiting for care, and corpses left to pile up in hallways-these are some of the images coming out of China (or rather, they were before these citizen-journalists were silenced). The health emergency is wreaking havoc on the nation's government-run healthcare system, and truth be told, the whole fiasco is a sad reminder of the dangers of state-sponsored care.

    Yet in the midst of all this devastation, liberals are relentless in their calls for a similar form of state control here - and they're doing so at their own demise.

    Just as a reminder, Americans' healthcare premiums have more than doubled since 2013 under Obamacare. Countless people have lost access to their doctors. Perhaps worst of all, thousands of critically-ill and disabled people have been pushed to the side, forced to wait for care, while millions of able-bodied adults have enrolled in Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. It's also worth noting that state budgets are now buckling under the financial pressures of this expansion. In New York alone, the state's Medicaid program is running 16% over budget, leaving taxpayers on the hook for a $4 billion deficit.