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My doc bleeds me dry
By Luke Holden (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-02 13:38
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I love being rich. Not just normal rich, but the kind of crazy rich that groups me with billionaire madmen buying foolish girls at expensive parties. I especially love handing out bucket loads of yuan to pay for a consultation with a doctor fluent in my mother tongue. Oh, the joy of being rich.
Then again, it's all in my head. I don't frequent the high-class pimping services of Beijing's elite, and I definitely don't like paying excessively just to stop pain. I am average and life isn't fair.
Life got slightly worse, though, when a recent series of exhilarating personal events lead to a stress-induced stomachache that robbed me of both energy and weight.
As everyone does, I tried to put off the hospital trip until I could do so no longer. Off I trotted, allowing enough time to get back to work and carrying what I though was an obscene amount of money - 1,000 yuan.
My employer is fantastic because it covers the majority of my medical bills at one particular well-known hospital which offers treatment in English. All I needed to do was survive the initial expense and claim it back later.
However, after turning up at the hospital I became instantly lost and was unsure which department to approach. I tried to ask a nurse for help but had one of those conversations with departing family relatives through train windows, and I was definitely not fit enough to jog.
Unperturbed, I finally stumbled upon a massive map that resembled a ridiculously colorful mosaic, or perhaps a disturbed child's finger painting, which didn't help, either. I was running out of options.
It was a call to an experienced buddy that got me moving again, easterly and away from the bulk of the campus. Up ahead was the designated section for international treatment, a much quieter area without millions of sick people and not one, but three unfilled chairs.
Actually, I am even understating this particular point. The chairs were luxurious blue loungers, clean and spacious like sofas. It was now that I could truly understand what life would have been like to be rich, except there wasn't a brainless leech in sight. I digress.
I filled out a form and was led to a waiting area, where I waited. And waited. The wall clock ran an eternal race against my wristwatch and I grew nervous of being late for work. My tummy - I mean my stomach - started hurting again and I was hungry. And tired. And poor.
And then it happened. My name was called out loud across the hospital corridor, an event that has not happened once over my six years in China and still has the affect of turning this grown man into a shy teenager - they all know my name now!
The doctor was indeed professional, although she did appear aggressively keen to get me into surgery: "It's the only way to get a definite diagnosis."
"Nope," I said, and I stuck to my case that I should rule out indigestion first with simple medicine. "By the way, how much am I looking at for the bill," I asked naively.
"700 yuan!"
In truth she only said it, but in my head it sounded like the roar of a jet engine, or the explosion of that office building in Die Hard 2.
Alarm bells started ringing as to why I was being charged so much, bells that shot off the scale when I heard that 300 yuan of it was for the consultation charge.
I have been to hospitals before, normal hospitals, and consultation fees range from a couple of yuan right up to about 30. They climb higher for expert analysis, but normally these are only paid when time is of the essence - costly doctors mean shorter queues.
The situation is even more bizarre when I learned that the rest of this hospital also applies regular fees - the sky-high rate is apparently a bonus reserved exclusively for foreigners and those aforementioned excessively rich people. A string of questions flooded my mind.
Do 300-yuan doctors offer better advice? Does that mean that doctors in the regular hospital are incompetent? Or more likely, are 300-yuan doctors charging this much simply for their English ability? If that was the case, why did mine diagnose me with a fictional illness? (She mispronounced my problem as a combination of two diseases that Google proclaims as nonsense.)
As I left the hospital that day, clutching my stomach with one hand and my wallet with the other, I thought deeply about how lucky I was that I could get 90 percent of the fee back and how unfair it was that others couldn't.
I love the idea of the insane rich getting their comeuppance, but I don't think it should be in their time of need, and definitely not from the hospital itself. It just isn't right.
The writer is METRO's copy editor.
