PRC's healthcare system is definitely better than the USA by most metrics, especially access, but it's absolutely not free or universal. My fiance's daughter-in-law works in a hospital pharmacy in Shanghai, which has a ton of homeopathic/traditional Chinese medicine bullshit going on unfortunately as well. Placebo effect is pretty strong though. Anyway, if you get cancer in China you're still pretty fucked financially, except that you probably have a pretty strong family network that's going to pool their resources to finance it.

It's likely to change in the near future, contemporary Mandarin dramas (亲爱的小孩 comes to mind) depicting the financial stress of such situations have been pretty popular and people all "know" that the state must eventually make it free & universal.