this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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This hospital front desk looks like a Maccas!
Is China even socialist? I don't see it. User pay socialism? You need cash to see a doctor, even at a hospital. $4 is not loose change for most Chinese people, that could be a day's income or more, and this figure may vary and increase over time. China has lifted people out of poverty, but only above the pathetically low poverty line set by Western imperialists to hide poverty, especially in the Global South. From what I'm told, and I'm no expert of course, China barely has public healthcare or a social security system. It's all user-pay. And heaven forbid you suffer mental health issues. That is what my Chinese friend in China tells me. They tell me China is capitalist, more ruthlessly capitalist than some Western welfare states. The system depicted is actually kind of dystopian to my eyes. Like a Maccas restaurant, who introduced those self service machines to replace jobs. Why not hire people to make appointments and talk to patients? China has enough people needing work and it's better quality service for patients. It saddens me to see China so capitalist, it may twist and corrupt the CPC until they're not communists anymore, if they still are.
However, compared to the hole we call the USA, even China's user pay capitalistic healthcare looks like utopia lol.
He will be devastated to hear this but I will relay to President Xi immediately that a 46 second TikTok of a yankee visiting a Chinese hospital has failed to convince Noddyo of Lemmygrad that China is socialist.
LOL I eagerly await his response
Babe wake up, new copypasta just dropped
Oh. I'm sure my concern is not original or unique. Don't get me wrong, I go into bat for China against the mad anti-Chinese sentiment around me: I live in Australia you see. But in here, we're all anti-capitalists yeah? So it's just me expressing maybe not the best argument or observation, but a fear i have. I really do have a friend in China, and another friend who visited China. And they throw cold water on my positivity about China's socialism, arguing what I posted. That Chinese socialism is not what I have imagined, eg Cuba like public healthcare. I'm ignorant, you will have to forgive me, it's not instantly curable.
Not even sure what that means. Suppose I should look it up?
I mean China is a vast country with a developing economy still, with huge differences in development between provinces. The grass is greener on the other side but that goes for people living there too. They don't suddenly get an all-encompassing perspective of their conditions just because they live in one city in one country. And different people have different opinions; there are maoists in China who think the CPC is not communist anymore and they need to do their protracted war to reestablish a DotP which is like... if I was Chinese I doubt I would listen to these people. I don't even listen to them in my own country lol.
So it's the same thing here,
How do they know that? Have they had experience with Swedish a British hospital visit?
It's the same problem people experienced at the end of the USSR which was used to push for regime change. They saw the benefits they had, they saw western grocery stores and culture (music, shows, posters etc) and they thought oh, if we have capitalism then we'll have both the soviet social benefits and the western consumer benefits!
... And then the USSR was overthrown and they had none of the social benefits and couldn't even afford the consumer products anymore. The west had never had the soviet social benefits either. To give you an idea it was so deep-rooted that there was a daycare at every job site so you could leave your kid when you got at work (instead of having to wake up early to drive them to the
Like I also pay for any doctor visit and I live in the enlightened west. I wish a visit was 4$ lol.
4$ is also probably for foreigners and depends on whether he went to a private or public hospital. Gansu is the poorest province in China, and they introduced a cap of 5RMB on each visit back in 2011.
But you kinda answered your own question regarding this particular hospital. They have a lot of people and they need to get them healthcare. The Chinese system is very efficient for that. You may only spend 10 minutes with the doctor and be sent off for testing or treatment (which they also do where I live and it's not as efficient lol), but at least they get it right on the first time and you're done. And as the guy says in the video you get a same-day appointment by just showing up. It's like, what are they supposed to do? Either hyper-individual care where the dr spends 45 minutes with you and they leave lots of people without prompt healthcare (and then maoists will complain they don't have healthcare) or do rolling appointments (with no errors might I add) and then people will complain it's too factory-like.
Don't know the details but China has national insurance schemes that are almost universal. On a Chinese government webpage from a few years ago they said that 95% of the people (citizens or residents or whatever) have at least the basic medical insurance. So most people won't have to pay full price for an appointment.
Is Vietnam a socialist country? Is Italy a capitalist country?
And people from other instances call lemmygrad pro-China