Seems like every country has the same problem...."What we're seeing with the new plan is a move back to a more socialist approach to medicine by providing for the majority," said Pollard.
If successful, the sick will not be the only beneficiaries: the economy as a whole could undergo a fundamental change, and several business sectors--drug companies, medical equipment manufacturers and insurance companies--will all be affected....
The other main problem with the healthcare delivery system is that it is not always working in the interest of patients. Government funding for hospitals has gradually diminished, while at the same time the state imposes price control on many services. The result is that hospitals often over-prescribe drugs, or sell expensive patented drugs with a high mark-up. The hospital benefits financially from this because not only do they prescribe the drugs, they dispense them too. Hospitals in China make around 60% of their revenues from prescribing drugs, compared to the 10% to 20% that is typical in Western countries. In the draft guidelines, released last year, there were plans to separate the prescribing and dispensing of drugs. But in the final document these were only introduced as a pilot plan, suggesting that the government has decided not to tackle the hospital inefficiencies head on, but indirectly through improvements in the financing of treatment....
Now that the US market is settling comfortably into a statist torpor, it is time to call attention to the fact that America faces challenges of an entirely different kind than it ever has in the past. This generation of Americans simply doesn't know what's going to hit it.
Wealth comes from sweat and smarts. Here's a factoid for you: China has 60 million elementary and secondary school students studying piano or orchestral instruments and playing classical music. America has 30 million students, total. China has classical music students at twice the number of all American students waiting in the pipeline to join the job market. Add to these the smart Indian kids who will be graduating from India's technical institutes with the world's sharpest math skills, and it seems likely that during the next five or ten years, a good 75% of the best-qualified job market entrants will come from China and India.
I cite the classical music students in order to emphasize that we are not talking about robotic nerds who know how to crunch numbers but have no creative ability. A "Spengler" essay from last December provides some detail. Anyone who has not been hiring young Asians has no clue how cultured and curious they are. Their American counterparts have seen life as a perpetual spring break interrupted by brief episodes of work, and are simply in no shape to compete.
In past years, to be sure, the smartest Asians came to America. That's where the capital markets were. A rich Chinese wouldn't lend money to a poor Chinese, unless the poor Chinese first moved to America. Our financial system was the glory of the world. That was then. If you are a smart Chinese or Indian entrepreneur, are you likely to get richer by moving to the US or by staying at home? Emerging market equities are a far more interesting proposition than the US stock market under Emperor Obama I. Bonus restrictions? Compensation caps? They never heard of them in Mumbai or Shanghai.
America isn't getting the immigrants any more, that is, the top-of-the-line human capital. As China reorients its economy towards domestic spending, America won't get the capital, either. America isn't going to crash. Unless it changes course, it will slowly sink into the mud, like England did during the 20th century.
China has been hoarding gold lately. China claims that it has been holding on to just as many US Dollars. It's just holding on to more gold. Don't believe it!
