Chinese turn to US doctors amid distrust in health service
Companies offering Chinese families a second opinion on treatment from US-based physicians amid concerns over China’s underfunded and overstretched medical system
The doctor told Renee Gao’s parents that the tumour in their teenager’s chest was not disappearing. The girl would need a costly operation that could leave her sterile – if she survived.
Then he ushered them out.
Gao Jiang and Yu Wenmei had dragged their ailing daughter across Kunming in the southern province of Yunnan, then north to the best cancer hospitals in Sichuan province and Beijing. The family stood in hours long queues and called in favours from colleagues at Gao’s life insurance company to speed up the wait. But no one would tell them why the cure for their 16-year-old’s lymphoma might threaten her life.
“I felt hopeless,” Gao said.
So at a colleague’s suggestion, he turned to a Shanghai start-up called MediStar Health that paired cancer patients with foreign doctors via teleconference. They consulted with three American physicians, who recommended chemotherapy treatments instead. Two years later, Renee is in remission and preparing for college in Australia.
China provides basic health care coverage to nearly all its 1.4 billion people and has spent almost a decade trying to upgrade services. But many Chinese continue to harbour deep distrust in an overstretched, underfunded health care system.