Access is also quite impressive. Patients can choose from pretty much any provider or therapy. Wait times are short, and patients can go straight to specialty care without a referral.

Premiums are paid for by the government, employers and employees. The share paid by each depends on income, with the poor paying a much smaller percentage than the wealthy.

Taiwan’s cost of health care rose faster than inflation, as it has in other countries. In 2001, co-payments for care were increased, and in 2002, they went up again, along with premiums. In those years, the government also began to reduce reimbursement to providers after a “reasonable” number of patients was seen. It also began to pay less for drugs. Finally, it began to institute global budgets — caps on the total amount paid for all care — in the hope of squeezing providers into becoming more efficient.

Relative to the United States and some other countries, Taiwan devotes less of its economy to health care. In the early 2000s, it was spending 5.4 percent of G.D.P., and by 2014 that number had risen to 6.2 percent. By comparison, countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development spend on average more than 9 percent of G.D.P. on health care, and the United States spends about twice that.

After the most recent premium increase in 2010 (only the second in Taiwan’s history), the system began to run surpluses.

This is not to say the system is perfect. Taiwan has a growing physician shortage, and physicians complain about being paid too little to work too hard (although doctors in nearly every system complain about that). Taiwan has an aging population and a low birthrate, which will push the total costs of care upward with a smaller base from which to collect tax revenue.

Taiwan has done a great job at treating many communicable diseases, but more chronic conditions are on the rise. These include cancer and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, all of which are expensive to treat.