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What Are The Pros And Cons Of A Public Health Care System

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A public health care system is a system of health care financing designed to meet the cost of all or most health care needs from a publicly managed fund. In some countries, the fund is controlled directly by the government or by an agency of the government for the benefit of the entire population. A public health care system has its own advantages and disadvantages. As it consists of universal health care coverage, every residents or citizens of a particular country get to enjoy mandatory health services funded by the government. This system gives individuals that cannot manage the cost of health care the administrations required. However, a public health care system also has its own drawbacks. Patients that require administration often have …show more content…

A very good example is to look at China’s evolving health care systems. In the 1950s, when Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist Party took over China, they created a health care system that was typical of 20th-century communist societies. The government owned, funded, and ran all hospitals, from large, specialized facilities (often serving communist cadres) in urban areas to small township clinics in the countryside. The private practice of medicine and private ownership of health facilities disappeared. Physicians were employees of the state. From 1952 to 1982, the Chinese health care system achieved enormous improvements in health and health care. Infant mortality fell from 200 to 34 per 1000 live births, and life expectancy increased from about 35 to 68 years. These improvements also reflected major investments in public health through a highly centralized governmental agency modeled on the Soviet Union's system of the early 1950s. This public health apparatus achieved major gains in controlling infectious diseases through immunization and other classic public health measures, such as improved sanitation and the control of disease vectors, including mosquitoes for malaria and snails for schistosomiasis. By the beginning of the 1980s, China was undergoing the epidemiologic transition seen in Western countries: infectious diseases were giving way to

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