Overdue medical bill paid back half a century later

An overdue medical bill from the 1960s was recently paid. [Photo/Chinanews.com]

On Children's Day, the Shanghai Children's Hospital received a special festival gift – a payment of 6,600 yuan ($1,002) for an overdue medical bill dating back to the 1960s.

Younger brother Zheng Bin was just two years old when he was admitted to the hospital for a hernia, thepaper.cn reports.

The treatment cost 220 yuan and grain couple worth 2.5 kilograms of food. But the boy's family was so poor, the bill wasn't paid before he was discharged..

For decades, a medical bill reminder was kept somewhere in the family home. The brothers never knew it existed.

That was not until they sifted through their late mother's belongings recently when they stumbled across the reminder note, thus deciding to pay the overdue bill.

While the hospital said they would accept only the original sum, the brothers insisted on repaying the debt plus interest – as much as 30 times the original cost. Besides, they donated 2,000 yuan each to help sick children in the hospital.