Funded by.....?
All of us, as all medical costs are. Remember, the concept of medical bills is wholly alien here to almost anyone born after 1948.
A phrase which has undergone a weird semantic shift
This much is true, however as a term it hasn't become more respectable. Since covid and the trumpet disaster, conspiracy theories have run rife.
Big business and major exporters having an 'agenda' to make the profits that they exist to make is hardly a conspiracy though, nor is it new. As for China, their strategy in business growth is so transparent that it can hardly be called a conspiracy. They're doing (albeit on a more efficient scale, being enabled by very new tech) more or less what America tried to do in the 50s, what France and the U.K. we're up to 30 years before.
How much does your welfare figure into any of those
You know my political affiliation. Does the welfare of workers figure at all to businesses other than in the matter of keeping them able to work in situations where they can't be immediately or cheaply replaced by scab labour, or spend their meagre wages in privately owned shops. This is nothing new; the Labour Movement has been saying it since 1830.