Global East Asia Health Insurance Oral Histories

Persistent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11299/276485

The Global East Asian Health Insurance project is a collection of oral history interviews with key individuals, particularly Americans, who have played significant roles in establishing or analyzing health insurance systems in East and Southeast Asia, especially in China and Taiwan. Dr. Wayne Soon from the Program in the History of Medicine conducted these interviews.

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    Oral History Interview with William Hsiao
    (2025-08-20) Soon, Wayne; Hsiao, William
    William Hsiao is the K.T. Li Professor of Economics, Emeritus, in Department of Health Policy and Management and Department of Global Health and Population, at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Hsiao is a leading global expert and consultant on health insurance policies and reforms. He was born in China, educated in the United States, and received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He is also a fully qualified actuary with extensive experience in private and social insurance. Dr. Hsiao’s health economic and policy research program spans across the world. He is a leading global expert in universal health insurance, which he has studied for more than forty years. He has been actively engaged in designing health system reforms and universal health insurance programs for many countries and regions, including Taiwan, China, and the United States. Dr. Hsiao was elected to be a member of the National Academy of Medicine, US National Academy of Science, and elected to be a Board member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and USA Society of Actuaries. He has published more than 180 papers and several books and served on several editorial boards of professional journals. He served as a policy advisor to three US presidents, the US Congress, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization, and International Labor Organization.
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    Oral History Interview with Tsung-Mei Cheng
    (2025-06-02) Soon, Wayne; Cheng, Tsung-Mei
    Tsung-Mei Cheng is an American health policy research analyst at Princeton University. Together with her husband, Uwe E. Reinhardt of Princeton University, Cheng provided critical advice to the Taiwanese government in establishing a single-payer national health insurance system in 1995. She has given numerous talks around the world on issues relating to health care and health policy, including the United States, China, Taiwan, Japan, countries in Southeast Asia, Europe, Mexico, and the Middle East. Cheng is a regular commentator in domestic and international news media on health care in China, Taiwan and the United States, as well as the recent COVID crisis. She was the lead witness in a 2014 U.S. Senate hearing on universal healthcare and appeared in “Sick Around the World,” a 2008 Frontline documentary by the Public Broadcasting Corporation.