Day 18: Hong Kong

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

Our day started at the School of Public Health and Primary Care of CUHK. We started with a very interesting talk by Dr. Michael Leung, an economist, who is a professor for undergraduate and graduate students at CUHK. He talked about the medical system in Hong Kong, the study of public health there, the health insurance policy, as well as the SARS outbreak. For me it personally was very eye opening and I collecting information to discuss with my sister, who is currently in medical school and very interesting in infectious diseases and public health. I think she too was surprised that not only is public health not very popular in Hong Kong but that there are only 2 universities related to the field in HK.

Mr. Leung brought up some very interesting points that I think would be great to incorporate in a discussion with students in economics or even history about health care policies around the world. Even we are just talking about the US health care issues, HK is an interesting point of contrast.

According to Dr. Leung, HK has no major health policy other than “no one should be denied adequate medical treatment through lack of means.” He also mentioned that the health care system is going well based on stats but in reality it is not well organized internally. To be honest I was a little confused about how effective the healthcare system is. He said that the country has 97% subsidized public medicine and not very many people have health insurance. Having lived in Britain for a while and having experienced the subsidized British healthcare I imagined it to be similar to that. You have most of your medicines mostly paid for, you have access to medical care but no promise that its quality care, and when you need to get medical tests or go through procedures you have to endure long waiting periods. I am now curious though if it better than that or how it different that the socialized medicine of the UK. In my search to find more information on the health care system I found some interesting articles online that you too can check out if you are personally interesting or you want to share in your classroom.

Here is one article that may be bit dated but it does talk about how HK’s system is different from UK’s system and also how HK is looking to possibly use the DRG system, which is the US based system-believe it or not. This article also refers to the resource allocation issues Dr. Leung referred to, including the issues of mainland women having their babies in Hong Kong: ">http://www.hkdf.org/newsarticles.asp?show=newsarticles&newsarticle=163
I have a feeling the link does not work but you can copy and paste.

So, Dr. Leung also talked about SARS. Clay kindly gave us more details about this discussion with the powerpoint (thanks Clay). I was fascinated after this discussion by the reaction of the HK public and government to public health and sanitation. Sooo when I returned to HK after many of you went back to Cali I took random pictures illustrated this. I have attached them below. If you find a way to incorporate this in any lesson in any class...let me know.

Will write more later...it was a LONG DAY.[Edit by="ptalreja on Aug 9, 6:22:58 PM"][/Edit]

[clay dube]

Great work Priya getting us started discussing health care (and the economics of health care). Thanks, too, for posting a photo and including a link to a potentially useful article.

Here's a link to the presentation:
http://www.sphpc.cuhk.edu.hk/cms/images/stories/event/Event/2010/20100721_usc_us_china_workshop_fin.pdf

Of course, Priya's right. This was a long day and included discussion of migrant (and mostly domestic) workers, a new internationally-oriented school in Guangdong province, and Hong Kong politics. It would be great for others to chime in on this.

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