Going public: confessions of an expat snob

I have spent the past 15 years avoiding Hong Kong's public health-care system like the plague. Instead, I entrusted the birth of my two children, surgery for my double hernia and a host of other, lesser medical problems to private doctors and hospitals.

If you add it all up, keeping my family healthy in Hong Kong has cost a small fortune. My insurance plan has helped, but I have nevertheless felt the financial bite that goes with private health care in this city.

So why have I continued to pay? Perhaps it is time to confess that, until very recently, I was a snob. Like many fellow expatriates, I felt obliged to pay more than is reasonable for everything, including health care, to sustain my misplaced sense of superiority. As far as my family was concerned, the city's public hospitals existed in a foreign realm of inferior doctors and mythically long queues. We simply did not go there.

Finally, one Sunday recently, I thought about my dwindling bank account, put aside my long-standing pride and stepped into a public hospital emergency ward. I discovered that public health care is not a plague to be avoided but, rather, a boon to be exploited. In a nutshell, it is cheap, and it is good. Only a snob would turn away from its many merits.

Consider as an alternative the system in my native country, the United States, where medical care is financed mainly through insurance provided at the workplace as part of an employee's package.

This is fine - unless you happen to be one of the 45 million Americans who do not have access to such a plan and thus also have no reliable health care. Because of the country's inadequate commitment to public health, nearly 16 per cent of the population is at risk.