Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

On April 7, 2009, Beijing announced that health insurance coverage would be extended from 30 to 90 percent of China’s population and that central funds would be allocated to pay for the construction of two thousand county hospitals and five thousand township-level clinical centers. It was the largest expansion in health-care provision in world history to date and it was “inextricably interwoven with the stimulus package.” Beijing was happy to approve spending on hospitals, clinics and public insurance subsidies “because concerns about short-run deficits” had “evaporated. . . . The economic crisis . . . opened a window in which a more aggressive fiscal approach to social policy has become possible.”