This presentation argues that comparative histories of health insurance can be a productive lens to reexamine nation-building processes, political patronage, and industrial productivity. While postwar China and Taiwan similarly provided health insurance for their laborers, a finer comparison of their provenance and implementation reveals contrasting ideologies. For example, the People’s Republic’s socialist construction of hospitals and sanatoriums for its insured differed from Taiwan’s firm belief in contracting care with healthcare providers rather than directly running them.  The PRC’s jettison of labor insurance in favor of coverage based on mass mobilization in the 1970s cast a long shadow on its efforts to implement universal healthcare decades after. In contrast, the ROC in Taiwan sought to modify problems of labor insurance, such as high costs and limited coverage and succeeded in developing national health insurance in the 1990s. However, its longstanding patronage model of insurance cast shadows on the insured decades after. Thus, health insurance provides a critical lens to reexamine public health and ideology assumptions in Chinese East Asia.

Co-sponsored by EAS, Department of History & International Studies.

Wayne Soon Associate Professor Program of the History of Medicine in the Department of Surgery

Program of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Biography (provided by the speaker, can upload to the website): Wayne Soon is an Associate Professor in the Program of the History of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and the Program of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is the author of Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford: 2020), and currently writing a book on the history of health insurance, medicine, and society in postwar China and Taiwan.