Health Without Wealth

They say you can’t put a price on health – then they go ahead and make it as expensive as the market will possibly bear. Therein lies reason #917-b to love living in China; the market will bear significantly less price-gouging, even when it comes to health care.

Not so long ago, the average urban Chinese salary equaled what today’s average urban Chinese family spends at McDonald’s after junior’s English lesson. The average urban Chinese worker got a free apartment in a community built around his company, and that community included a health clinic. The clinics are still there, and since the late nineties, open to non-community members.

They don’t look anything like the dazzlingly white institutions one sees on prime-time hospital dramas. From the outside, there’s little to distinguish them from any other socially-realistic building in the neighborhood, especially to the Mandarin-illiterate. Yet the range of services is comprehensive, and jaw-droppingly affordable.

Take one such modest value health center on the west side of Beijing, for example. The clean yet anachronistic hallways, dimly lit shades of medicinal green, put one in mind of a late 80s YMCA. The signs outside each room are in both English and Mandarin, although otolaryngology might stump those who flunked out of pre-med [it’s ears, nose, and throat]. Along with ophthalmology, pre-natal care, ultrasound, and a radiology room, there are departments for Eastern specialties such as acupuncture and moxibustion.

Here are some prices, to compare with your deductibles and monthly health insurance payments:

Bed in emergency care, per day: 120 RMB

Bed in general care, per day: 80 RMB

Private nurse, per day: 7 RMB

Electrocardiogram: 200 RMB

Hepatitis Shots: 150 RMB

Antibiotic injections, 10 days’ worth: 25 RMB

Pregnancy test: 8 RMB

Best of all, there was a stomatology department [dental clinic to you and me]. Dental care easily ranks as the most frequently used and outrageously-priced health service expats fret over, for themselves and their families. There are no magazines in the waiting area here, but the equipment looks up-to-date, and the smell of pulverized tooth instantly recognizable. In the name of field research, your correspondent opted for some caps, with the hoped-for side benefit of making his smile a little less Schwarzeneggarian.

Before After

In and out – 150 RMB. No call ahead for appointment – the clinic won’t hear of it. Instead, you report to registration for your gua hao, a slip of paper with a number on it. Numerical order is generally adhered to, unless a patient has some heavy guanxi or is making a mess of the tile floors.

Downside – no English service, and no malpractice suits. While refusing to consider elective surgery at one is understandable, writing such clinics off as a danger the economically disadvantaged must suffer would be wrongheaded. Not a doctor there in a Mercedes, but all are licensed and accredited. All the needles come fresh out of plastic wrappers. Those who believe general medical technology transfer from West to East is incomplete, and that only doctors who speak English know what they’re doing, should at least pay such a clinic a visit for a tooth cleaning (40 RMB). Blue Cross need be none the wiser.

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