China Life Expectancy: The New York Times Visualized
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010So the New York Times posted an article by David Leonhardt called In China, Uneven Progress in Health. It’s essentially a “they’re doing great but…” China article. This time it was: the economy has been great and all, but success has been distributed unevenly and healthcare has not been improving concomitantly. Well, duh. I’m not sure what the news is here. My theory is that this guy just came back from a China trip and felt like writing this up; he just about says as much in the article. All of his other articles are related to U.S. economics and fiscal policy, nothing China related at all.
In any case, the real point of the article is to set up China as a counterpoint (or a straw man, if we want to be cynical about it) to the United States, which he calls out in the final paragraph (if you can call them that, as I was counting I was struck by how short journalism paragraphs are):
There is, after all, another large country with unimpressive recent gains in life expectancy, even smaller than China’s. That’s right: the United States. Since 1990, we have been passed by Chile, Denmark, Slovenia and South Korea, among others. China is still five years behind us, but it’s gaining.
I was curious to see what the comments on this article thought, and I did a little survey:

There were only 20 comments on the article after two or three hours, and I divided them up into categories. The hash marks count comments and the numbers in parentheses count the total number of “Likes” attached to the comments in each category.
There were a couple off point comments which either reiterated some point in the article or brought up some totally irrelevant fact.
There were relatively few China Bashers, and their comments were mainly a grab bag of “communism blows,” “serves the baby poisoners right,” and then criticism of the one-child policy.
The China apologists were split between people who missed the point of the article slightly, or perfectly rational people explaining China’s mitigating circumstances. The former group seized on the article’s following “omission”:
The article began by saying that the rates of all these other countries (minus the U.S., which I just put there for reference) had increased their life expectancy at a faster rate than China, but the apologists faulted the author for not pointing out that China has nearly a decade on the other third world countries. Of course, those apologists consequently ignore the fact that the author also notes that some countries which started with higher life expectancies than China also improved at faster rates, see below. The latter group of apologists simply brought up points about population size and the like. Nothing earth-shattering.
(Isn’t google cool? That’s the World Bank data visualized.)
Finally, the self-deprecators, in the great majority, certainly got the point that was being made. It’s too bad it had to be made at China’s expense, but they do focus on criticizing domestic policy at least. But that’s not what China Bio Law is about so I don’t feel any obligation to go into it.
One thing I did particularly like about the article was the author’s little historical aside into the “Mortality Revolution,” which basically discussed how economic growth following the Industrial Revolution did not bring immediate health benefits along with it. I’ve put the book on this on my reading list.
Oh, and I suppose here’s the section that was most relevant to this blog; there’s nothing new and there’s already plenty of material out there on this stuff:
Finally, there is the medical system itself. The dismantling of state-run industrial companies over the last two decades has ended the cradle-to-grave benefits system known as the iron rice bowl. In its place was a market-based medical system many Chinese could not afford. Even in emergencies, people sometimes had to bring cash to the hospital to get treatment.
Early last year, the Chinese government began expanding health insurance coverage, with the goal of making it universal by 2020. The initial signs look pretty good. The World Bank does not have data past 2008, but numbers published by the C.I.A. suggest that life expectancy has risen in the last two years. In my travels, I visited a simple, clean clinic in rural northern China that seemed to be providing the kind of basic care that could make a huge difference.