TAIPEI, Taiwan Yun Yen is one of Taiwans leading oncologists and, until last year, was president of its most prestigious private medical school . But Yen knows plenty about American health care, too. He trained at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, did a fellowship at Yale and then spent more than 20 years on the staff at City of Hope, the internationally recognized cancer hospital in Southern California.

While in the United States, Yen developed a deep respect for its history of medical innovation and how it benefits the rest of the world. One of his goals in coming back to Taiwan was to help build a research infrastructure that could produce similar breakthroughs.

Most of the new cancer drugs come from the states, he said as we talked in his office this summer. The beauty of the U.S. is its high, advanced tech care.

But Yen also saw the downsides of American health care: the volatility for patients who changed insurance plans and lost access to their old provider networks; who had no insurance at all and were left dealing with financial crises as well as medical ones; or who had missed out on screenings or preventative care that might have detected cancer earlier.

This was not good medicine, Yen said, shaking his head. In this respect, Taiwan is better.