14 DAY TRIAL // After two decades of neglect, China is confronting with a monumental health crisis of the rural population. About 90% of the 800 million people in the country side lack proper medical care. Children do not get the vaccine they need; AIDS patients get free drugs, but lack necessary monitoring.
Zhang Deyuan, an expert on rural problems at Anhui University, stated: "Most of the people in rural areas dare not to see a doctor when they get sick simply because they cannot afford it." The communist leaders are not attempting to rebuild the health care system, crashed alongside cooperatives during the two decades of economical reform after the 1949 communist revolution, in order to fix the discrepancy between the fast developing cities and the poor rural areas.
This issue will be a priority at the meeting of China's parliament on Sunday. Plans have been made that by the year 2010 "farmers can expect safe, effective, convenient and low-cost health services," adding an extra of $1.1 billion to the treatments.
Scandals of corruption among the Chinese doctors culminated with the case of a patient at the hospital in Harbin asked to pay $680,000 for 67 days of treatment. The bill contained, among others, charges of 241 blood transfusions and 180 transfusions of intravenous fluid all in the same day.
The only help that China's rural population got was two decades after the communist revolution, when villages received help from "barefoot doctors" that provided basis medical services such as vaccination. "The situation became much worse when the farmers lost the barefoot doctors. Fundamentally, they're going down a slippery slope of decline in the overall health situation," declared Li Ling, researcher at the Peking University.
According to a World Bank survey on affordable care, China has the 187th position out of 191 countries; a day in a Chinese hospital costs about $240.