What Can China’s Healthcare Dystopia Teach the U.S. About Our Future?

What does a healthcare dystopia look like?

In my recent TED talk, I introduce you to a world where people die waiting for healthcare, where corporate interests reign, and where doctors get paid to do more rather than to the right thing.

I’m a Chinese-born, American-trained physician. A couple of years ago, I was given an opportunity to conduct a research project on China’s healthcare system. I traveled to 15 cities from Beijing to Inner Mongolia, visited over 50 hospitals, and had unprecedented access to doctors, medical students, nurses, administrators, and government officials. Given how China’s developed into a major world power, I expected to find a fair, functional system.

However, instead of this utopia, I found a dystopic world. People spoke about the 1980s, when universal healthcare was dismantled, and 900 million people lost coverage overnight. Everyone had a story of friends and family who died in front of hospitals because they couldn’t pay.

Doctors were unhappy too. Imagine you’re a doctor, and you trained all your life to listen and heal; suddenly, overnight, you’re a businessman and you have to work your patient to get every cent.

On the other hand, if you’re a well-off patient and you hear that poor people get denied services, what do you want for yourself? You want everything to be done. Because you have the money, nobody will tell you about the risk of radiation of a CT scan. Same for expensive but untested medications, or potentially dangerous procedures. People got what they wanted, but at what cost?

No doubt, China has been very successful. The government has lifted millions out of poverty. But there is a fundamental problem, a blind spot that’s been missed in the rush towards economic reform.

This blind spot is our belief that being a consumer enables choice, and that choice is power. I’m all for empowering people to have choices. But turning patients into consumers means that healthcare is a commodity, not a right. It becomes possible to deny life-saving treatment, and to sell unnecessary, even harmful, interventions. The doctor-patient relationship becomes a transaction between salesman and client.

That blind spot, and the consequences, are not unique to China. Here in the U.S., costs of healthcare are escalating out of control. While millions remain uninsured, 30% of all tests and treatments are done are unnecessary. It’s far more profitable to peddle drugs than prevent illnesses. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 94% of doctors have some affiliation with drug and medical device companies.

By no means am I romanticizing the pre-1980s Communist state. My family left on political asylum, and I am very grateful for the opportunities afforded to me by my adopted country. But capitalism doesn’t have to equate consumerism, and the beauty of a democracy is that we as citizens can decide what type of society we want to live in.

To prevent further problems in our country, and to stop the rest of the world from following us down this path, we have to make a difficult decision. We must decide if it’s important to us to preserve our core tenets of liberty, democracy, equity, and justice. If not, we know what the dystopic future will look like. If so, the time is now to decide that there are some things that are not for sale, and that we must realign incentives to help people be their best selves.