The collapse of socialized medicine in China has opened a gap between care in the cities and the rural areas.

As a result, according to the government’s own estimates, in less than a generation a rural population that once enjoyed universal, if rudimentary, coverage is now 79 percent uninsured.

The near total absence of adequate health care in much of the countryside has sown deep resentment among the peasantry while helping to spread infectious diseases like hepatitis and tuberculosis and making the country – and the world – more vulnerable to epidemics like severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and possibly bird flu.

The failure of the government to provide decent health care for peasants has reinforced the idea of China as two separate nations: one urban and increasingly comfortable, the other rural and increasingly miserable.

Read (New York Times)