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this is why i mentioned basic healthcare
the system during the mao period managed to do that really well - this is doable, since whenever the material requirements are low enough you can change things through sheer force of will, as the barefoot doctors certainly did and got huge gains from it
but it wasn’t universal healthcare - or do you think the barefoot doctors had access to the latest chemotherapy medicines? radiotherapy machines? MRIs? respirators, ICUs, and so on
unless you believe traditional chinese medicine can take care of this stuff, which it obviously can’t, there are very real material limitations and ideals can only take us as far as they allow us to
my criticism to the reforms was shutting off free access to basic treatment in the short term, because this, as you said, could have easily been provided - but i haven’t read their justifications for it
You’d actually be surprised as to what level of care was conducted by the barefoot doctors. Also I might point out that there is nothing in the definition of universal healthcare that suggests you need to have the very advanced equipment (not sure how much of that was largely available in the 1950s anyway). Universal healthcare is simply a system where all citizens are guaranteed easy access to healthcare. FYI the Maoist regime didn’t care for ‘traditional Chinese medicine’ (a nonsense term btw) but it is actually being significantly more espoused TODAY and even by government sources.
The justification as for why basic treatment’s access was changed was because the nature of health care largely changed. It stopped being solely the purview of the state. Private actors were allowed in, provincial governments felt they could let budgets slide. You can say that ah they couldn’t have gotten better tech if not for this budgetary change but I mean most government run healthcare programs would disagree.
Universal healthcare is simply a system where all citizens are guaranteed easy access to healthcare
i understand, but if you can’t afford specialized treatment that means people won’t have access to it
so how universal is that access, really?
traditional Chinese medicine’ (a nonsense term btw)
what do you mean by that? TCM has a very identifiable theoretical basis for each of its branches, i don’t see the issue with the term
but it is actually being significantly more espoused TODAY and even by government sources.
this wasn’t really my point, and i don’t know how much more espoused it is today
but it’s still far more incentivized by the government than i deem ideal, that’s for sure. i don’t know if they’ve just decided these practices are so deeply rooted in their culture that they’re impossible to suppress, and that it was better to just cave in and regulate it instead, but it’s a waste of resources that could be used for stuff that actually works
The justification as for why basic treatment’s access was changed was because the nature of health care largely changed. It stopped being solely the purview of the state. Private actors were allowed in, provincial governments felt they could let budgets slide. You can say that ah they couldn’t have gotten better tech if not for this budgetary change but I mean most government run healthcare programs would disagree.
this makes sense, do you have a source i could look at? especially for the effectiveness of government run healthcare programs
I mean the question about specialized treatment is a valid one but again I am not sure how valid it is in the face of the Maoist project being dead for 50 years. We cannot really definitively say that the latest advancements would not have been procured by the state later on, and again I am not sure that we can sya the state of the field today is one where every villager has access to an MRI machine. There are certain treatments one cannot get in the UK under free healthcare today, but you can get them in the US if you pay a shit ton of money. The UK still has ‘universal’ healthcare, though, as it can offer some treatment of the illness even if not the specific, best one. The US will give it to you if you are willing to pay a shit ton of money. I would wager we would both take the former.
TCM is a moniker that actually a lot of Sinologists really get irritated at. My apology if I did as well. We don’t like it because it projects the idea of a single or even single continuum of traditional practices that were part of a body of scientific or pseudo-scientific knowledge in pre-modern China. But no such body existed. Much of the stuff was actually invented after the fact, many of the medicinal prescriptions were practiced by people that were very much at odds with each other, and the idea of medicine in say Qing-era China was radically different. TCM is very much an invented category for what is largely a set of practices that were made traditional, rather than really representing ‘tradition’.
It is more ‘espoused today’ in the sense that, again, Maoist era officials hated the idea of anything ‘traditional’, invented or not, and strictly forbid ‘superstitious’ practices like qigong etc. Again there is nothing about these practices that are deeply rooted in a singular ‘Chinese culture’ because that singularity is actually a lot more hetereogenous than people give it or credit for, and a lot of these supposedly popular ‘ancient’ practices were only made popular after the fact.
If you want a good source on healthcare in China today vs the Maoist era, Martin Whyte has written a lot on this.
