Karl Marx famously postulated that capitalism was a step on the road to socialism, but looking at the world today, one gets the impression that the road goes both ways. In America, a country that ostensibly sees life as an unalienable right, the battle over universal health care rages on, framed correctly but maliciously as a step toward socialism. But China, the only major “socialist” power left in the world, has seen the crumbling of its health care system over the last thirty years, coinciding with its slip into capitalism “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Neither country has an ideal health care system, but that is where the similarities end.  According to the Associated Press, the Chinese government is injecting $124-billion over three years to shore up the health care system, focusing on:

- Improving health services, in part by building 2,000 county hospitals and 29,000 township hospitals and ensuring that each of the country’s nearly 700,000 villages has a clinic.

- Expanding state health insurance from 70 to 90 percent of the population, or an additional 200 million people — equivalent to two-thirds of the U.S. population.

- Reducing drug costs by controlling prices for medications deemed essential.

It is an ambitious goal, if not entirely feasible, but it throws into stark contrast the sluggishness with which American health care legislation is being debated.  (For anyone who has quit paying attention, the Senate and the House have both passed health care legislation but have yet to reconcile their respective bills.)  This is the inherent disadvantage of democracy, further complicated in America by political obscurantism and entrenched corporate interests.  Oligarchy can lead to terrible decisions, but at least it’s quick.   China’s problem has never been promising things, but rather keeping those promises.   From the same article:

The central government has laid out a broad strategy but left specifics to local officials. The result is a series of experiments. While learning by doing is fine, there appears to be little formal evaluation of these trials, which may make it difficult to pinpoint what works…

China is using the same strategy that they used to test special economic zones—promulgating a goal and working backwards to find the best strategy that can be applied to the whole country.  But even if the government ends up meeting just a quarter of its goal, it will have given more people health care than are without it in the United States.

Which begs the question: does democracy in the United States protect people’s rights or has the political system become so broken that it actually does the opposite?  The Communist Party is by no means an enlightened despot but its ability to effect widespread, relatively-fast change is undisputed.  Whether it’s investment in infrastructure after the financial crisis, mobilizing rescue crews after the Sichuan earthquake, or spurring research in green energy, its quick thinking and unilateral decision making in those cases has helped the lives of its citizens.

Its track record of implementation, however, has not been as strong.  Corruption at lower levels of government is still rampant and pollution plagues the country partly due to skirted regulations.  This is where America typically has the advantage.  Staggered levels of courts and watchdog groups usually ensure that unprovocative legislation is enforced.  But after this year’s bailouts, public confidence in whether interest groups actually follow or are held accountable by the law has been shaken.

So what does this say about the future?  Which country will prove to be more responsible toward its citizens?  Outlandish as it might seem, it is arguably easier for the Chinese government to ease their hold on power than it is for the American people to reclaim theirs from the hands of corporate/political/religious interests that dominate American government today.  What’s sad is that all of Washington’s human rights criticisms are in danger of becoming painfully hypocritical if China gives its citizens universal health care before America.  At the end of this first decade in the twenty-first century, in terms of giving all its people access to affordable medical care, China and America have more in common than they realize.