Chinese Hospitals - How Substandard Are They?

We got April 30th and May 1st off work for the May Day holiday.  Then Saturday came along and we realized we hadn’t seen Mr. Hong all week.  Adam had called him a few times but got no answer and no reply, which is very strange.  Finally Mr. Hong called him back and said that he was in a hospital in Beijing.  Something had happened to him but he didn’t know the English term for it.  All we knew was that it was serious.  I mean, you don’t go all the way to Beijing for something small.  A couple days later we found out he’d had a minor heart attack.  He’s 27 years old.  We don’t know the cause yet, but the doctors were saying that in order to prevent another one, he’s going to have to remove as much stress from his life as possible.  Unfortunately, his job was pretty stressful.  Being the Project Manager for BMW, he traveled a lot and worked long hours.  So he had to quit.  He came back to Huainan for a couple days to delegate his work to Sophie, who will be his replacement, then went straight back to Beijing for more tests.  I didn’t even get to say goodbye because I was in Shanghai at the time.  He will be missed!

Perhaps he ate too much Elaborate Bacon

The thing I find most baffling about this, other than the fact that he’s so young, is that he had to go to Beijing.  A heart attack is not so complicated and rare a thing that you should have to go to the very best hospital in the country to get treated.  Is it really true that there was no hospital closer than Beijing that had the equipment and qualified doctors to deal with a heart attack?  Not even in Nanjing?  That boggles my mind!  I sure hope nothing happens to us.  Actually, when we were first negotiating the terms of our employment over here, Ian (an R&D guy out of Guilford US who was offered the China job and turned it down) told us not to settle for a health insurance plan that didn’t cover a helicopter to airlift us to Shanghai, Beijing, or Hong Kong should we be seriously hurt.  I laughed about it then, but perhaps it wasn’t such a frivolous demand.  (Don’t worry, we got it)

So my next thought is, just how cheap is Chinese healthcare?  Because Mr. Hong did not make very much money at all.  I hope he won’t be drowning in debt now.

Smudgie is hiding behind his poofball tail