Welfare: Housing and food rations traditionally have been heavily subsidized, and health care has been offered for free. However, the party, state, and military elites have had much better care than the average citizen, and great inequalities exist among the various social classes. Natural disasters in the 1990s led to a breakdown in food rationing and a rising inequality of services to the extent that upward of 300,000 North Koreans may have succeeded in fleeing to China in search of food.