Healthcare needs more than a checkup

Yet another child was taken out of Beijing's rat race on Saturday, not by the traffic, poisoned food or even pollution, but by an illegal medical clinic in Tongzhou district. A 2-year-old was given an injection by a woman who had been previously "punished for practicing medicine illegally." The toddler's cause of death is still being investigated.

These mini-clinics are a dime a dozen in rural areas; ramshackle buildings with crude hand-painted signage and no medical certification. Anyone who has a choice avoids them, but if you're down and out in Tongzhou, the chances are you don't have that luxury.

China's current public healthcare system is all-encompassing. If you're registered as a living, breathing human being in this city, you're most likely paying social insurance and therefore have health insurance.

The reality is much different. Public hospitals, which are subsidized by the social insurance scheme, are often packed like sardine tins with patients waiting to be seen.

General practitioners are still a non-entity in China. Specialists are only for when you fall ill, and most of the time they already have their hands full anyway.　

To avoid lengthy queues and minimalistic service, the culture of giving hongbao (red envelopes with money) to hospital staff has emerged. Doctors, despite their life-saving and life-prolonging talents, don't make a fortune working for a public institution.

Many of them are all too happy to take a few yuan in exchange for reshuffling their schedule and spending another 10 minutes by a patient's bedside.

Ultimately, the people who lose out are the very ones that are most at risk; migrant workers, farmers and others living with poor sanitation or quality of life.

It's bad enough that they struggle to pay the 70-odd percent of the bill that isn't covered by social insurance. But there's no way they can compete with a small shop owner who's fallen ill yet managed to put aside a few hundred yuan in bribes.

So they turn to the illegal clinics, just like the 19th century when Chinese railway workers in the US were injured and without assistance. Back then, they treated wounds with "snake oil" - a miracle cure-all that had absolutely no medicinal value.

People going to see the modern-day equivalent of rural "snake oil merchants" in their dodgy clinics are well aware of poor sanitation and under-qualified doctors, but they need the psychosomatic treatment of believing they have been administered some medicine.

Sadly, there's no solution to this problem. Healthcare will always be the biggest concern for the human race, and no country has ever really managed to perfect it.

Americans are largely against public healthcare, but wary of paying for its private variant. Britons have accepted public healthcare, yet learned to despise its inefficiencies such as long waiting times and lack of funding.

I have no doubt Chinese will come to despise universal healthcare as well in a matter of years. But if they want to start improving the current system, the country could do worse than training more general practitioners, paying doctors well enough so they aren't tempted to take bribes and opening more real clinics in the countryside that meet proper medical standards.