The Obama administration’s health care reforms have been a central part of the US political debate ahead of midterm elections on Tuesday. But for some US businesses it could be more productive to focus on an attempt to universalise medical coverage elsewhere - in China.
Government measures announced last year will “stimulate China’s health care market and create opportunities for private payers, providers, and IT vendors,” write consultants from McKinsey & Co. What’s more, they suggest that the health care industry might have that rare quality: an area of domestic consumption that grows faster that GDP.
In an article in McKinsey Quarterly, Claudia Süssmuth-Dyckerhoff and Jin Wang estimate that health care currently represents about 5 per cent of China’s GDP. With the government extending insurance to more citizens and building the hospitals to treat them, the authors add: