This is the fundamental problem, you seem to believe that people are good at choosing what they do and don't need in healthcare. Healthcare is the activity with ultimate information asymmetry - last time I checked, healthcare not a buffet where people get to choose what they need and want. By definition, the nature of insurance is that it covers unexpected outcomes.
Chinese Economics Thread
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This is the fundamental problem, you seem to believe that people are good at choosing what they do and don't need in healthcare. Healthcare is the activity with ultimate information asymmetry - last time I checked, healthcare not a buffet where people get to choose what they need and want. By definition, the nature of insurance is that it covers unexpected outcomes.
Most people know if they are chronically ill or not as well as the general-ish state of their health. Even if they don’t, people know how much money they make and since all health insurers have out-of-pocket maximums, they are all capable of calculating a worst case, for people employed full-time, they likely either have enough cash flow or liquid assets to meet those demands
Most people also know if they are good or bad drivers too, does that mean people should be allowed to not buy auto insurance? Lol.
Most of the growth is happening away from the T1s now. I recall see many of the T1s posting 1-2% growths. Some of this is due to policies to actively direct internal migration away from these T1s.
Not to mention, there is a student surplus right now during the vast expansion in university graduates as % of total population. In this case, the expansion is front-running - there are many more students than there are jobs because of how quickly student populations expanded but this will self-correct over time. This is just like how HSR was mostly empty when it was initially expanding but is now sustainable.
In the 2010s, you had very few university graduates, it was obviously a huge advantage in the job market. China was at 72% in 2022, so it's obviously not an advantage to be university-educated anymore when literally everyone else is too. At the same time just because the trend is going this way right at this moment, does not mean it will be sustained forever. 80-90% is basically the max for developed countries world wide. It structurally can't go any higher. At that point there will no more of this increasing surplus and there will finally be time for the Chinese economy to digest these workers and catch up with creation of jobs requiring such skills.
Yes, it sucks for those who are front-running, but the conclusion isn't China is doomed forever. Or to put it another way, it's always darkest before dawn.
edit: For context, it took China 10 years to go from 30% to 72% (2012-2022). It took the USA 50 years (1950-2000). Think about how much more time the old developed countries had to digest these seismic changes in society.
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The purpose of the mandatory auto insurance pool is much similar to community rated health insurance products - it’s meant to force safe drivers to cross-subsidize unsafe drivers in order for the roads to be safer in aggregate. Health insurance externalities are also smaller than auto insurance externalities. Also, people knowing what health condition they are in is the main determining factor for their solvency after breaching the health insurance worst case. The growth in HDHPs is adverse selection at work. That’s it lol.
Not true, public hospitals in the US write off significant amount of losses for treatment they give to people who can't pay. That's tax dollars not being collected by the government.
My argument has always been that the system in the US is a problem - not that the US has bad hospitals or doctors. That by definition is a healthcare system problem.
The externalities of any given individual not having health insurance to society are lower because it’s mainly chronic illness and internalized to the uninsured. Any car accident has an obvious other party that’s similarly injured, absent the existence of auto insurance, they may never be made whole.
total EMTALA losses are small, and part of public and nonprofit hospitals offering charity care/accepting Medicaid is that they get tax advantages in the bond market and not having to pay income/sales/property taxes in order to provide public goods. Its a completely reasonable policy
If your argument of the healthcare system as a whole doing poorly is the growth of HDHPs, that’s not really evidence of much of anything. HDHPs have some adverse selection, but since HDHPs are offered in a cafeteria plan, it forces the potential insured to reveal their health status to the insurer, and leads to some circumventing of community rating regulations under the ACA. Cat and mouse games and equity-efficiency tradeoffs are inherent to all economic policy
Like broadly on HDHPs: given that it’s uniquely offered through employer sponsored plans and they all have out of pocket maximums, their growing popularity isn’t evidence of “failure” or “declining quality of care” or anything else. It’s fairly informed people making a choice that financially advantages *them*
I would never worry about China with this rate of growth in tertiary education enrollment. It signals a big ascension.
This rate of tertiary enrollment growth that is happening in China currently has already happened in SK and Taiwan, increasing fivefold in around just 20 years, a few decades ago, with a similarly high proportion of STEM graduates.
It coincided precisely with Taiwan becoming a high-tech industrial economy and the rise of TSMC.
And a similar total transformation of the entire economy into high-tech was also recorded in SK during that period.
Meanwhile, during the same period, Taiwan's GDP increased by 400%, and SK's GDP was around 1500%.
And no business wants to create jobs and go into new advanced industries without people being present already.
It goes like this: Some company notices this increase in the STEM labor pool on the market, enough for them to take action, and only then create additional jobs requiring their advanced skills.
That's already what's happening in companies like Huawei and BYD at a massive scale.
For China, this process and the urbanization process (this takes slightly longer, around 30 years) would end both by the mid-2030s, exciting times.
So, until then, I expect the high youth unemployment ratio to persist, but it just means higher waiting for a job,
And then new graduates also wait for jobs, it doesn't mean that you won't get a job at all.
I don't know how it was in SK and Taiwan during their transitions (probably similar), but it's normal.
Yeah, I managed to find out about SK, it is similar to China now, it rose from 6% to 14% during their tertiary enrollment 'explosion', from the early 80s to the mid-2000s, and then it fell back again gradually from that point onward to around 4% today.
Look at this chart, the higher the youth unemployment ratio in China was, the higher its GDP was.
During the same period of this chart of youth unemployment trend, the Chinese nominal GDP also rose 45 times!