Overview of China’s Social Health Insurance
Chapter 3 draws from secondary materials and literature to review the history and evolution of social health insurance in contemporary China (since 1949), providing the historical background and the economic context of China’s social health insurance expansion in the 2000s. It shows that throughout the history of contemporary China, social welfare was never considered a basic social right for citizens. Despite dramatic changes in the coverage and generosity of social health insurance across different developmental periods, the stratification of Chinese social health insurance is persistent and was reinforced during the social health insurance expansion between 1999 and 2011. Moreover, the economic transition and the diversification of regional economies in China constitute the economic context, in which the Chinese central and local leaders’ motivations for and differential responses to social health insurance expansion take shape.