Outside InOpinion: Three reasons our health-care system is headed for a crisis

Over the past three weeks, I have seen far more of the inside of Hong Kong hospital wards than I would like – but it has reminded me clearly of the slow-boiling health-care crisis that is beginning to envelop Hong Kong, and prepped me well to comment on the far more severe crises overseas – not least Donald Trump’s assault on “Obamacare”.

My own hospital visitations can be blamed squarely on the ill fortune of my daughter, and the contrasts in her experience were noteworthy. First, three weeks ago, suffering with increasingly acute abdominal pain, she turned up in the early hours at Queen Mary Hospital’s Accident and Emergency ward.

After relatively little ado she was diagnosed with a gall stone, and with some clever non-invasive endoscopy (though is an endoscope thrust down your throat truly non-invasive?) had the stone zapped and destroyed. Her Queen Mary doctor is recommending she has her gall bladder out (were you aware that we don’t really need one?), but she was out of her six-bed hospital ward bright and well in three days with a HK$300 bill. Diplomatically, a footnote on the bill pointed out that without taxpayer subsidy, her bill would have been HK$8,280.

Both of us agreed that was quite enough of hospital wards for the time being, only to find her last week tumbling horribly down some stairs in Central, fracturing her fibula and being rushed by panicked friends to the Canossa Hospital in mid levels. She was treated with commendable speed and professionalism, and is now the proud owner of a titanium rod and heaven knows how many screws in her leg. She is home, immobile for six weeks, and has a HK$92,000 bill to mull over.

Lesson No 1: Hong Kong’s public hospitals offer remarkable service quality at preposterously cheap rates, even though they are creaking under the pressure of public overuse. Lesson No 2: service at the private Canossa was also immaculate and undoubtedly attended to my daughter’s fracture much more speedily than would have been possible at Queen Mary’s, but please don’t go near a private hospital in Hong Kong unless you are insured to the hilt.

These vivid recent local exposures, added to the distressing experience of watching my father die of cancer in the UK last year, sharing Canadian medical stories with two of my oldest friends, who have for more than three decades worked as general practitioners in Vancouver, and listening to the bru-ha-ha in the US about overthrowing Obamacare, made me glad to be in Hong Kong. Despite the severity of the pressures on our health care system, and its clear shortcomings, I think we are lucky compared with many in either the US or Britain.