Sorry.  Yes, this is another of those true stories that cannot possibly be made funny.  Somehow I have to write it.

Just before Christmas a little pre-term baby was born in a smallish city in China.  He weighed 1.4 lbs, couldn’t breathe on his own, and had a weak heartbeat.  The local clinic told the family to take him immediately to a hospital, or he would die.

The Grandma took him.  But the hospital, true to standard procedure in China, would only admit the baby if the parents could pay the required advance payment of 10,000 yuan, which represents about 1-2 years salary for the average Chinese (it’s about $1500).

The family couldn’t begin to raise that, so Grandma took the tiny thing back home and tried to keep him warm.  They got no supplies, nothing at all, from the hospital to help them. The unheated house was below freezing at night so she held him against her for warmth, and  since he couldn’t breathe she blew air into his face to help him.  She used a dropper to feed him drops of milk and was happy when he seemed to be able to suck a little milk on his own.

“For a preterm baby this small to live this long without intensive care has to be a miracle,” said a Pediatrician from the Hong Kong Chinese University.

He lived 11 days under her care.   The publicity from the news article generated donations from people to cover the cost of the admittance, and perhaps also pressured the hospital, which on the 28th told the family they would admit him.  He died at 4 am the morning of the 29th from lack of oxygen, before his family could get him there.

What you should understand is that this story is not special or unique.  Cash payment in advance is standard:  China does not provide medical care to its people (neither does it provide retirement care, and only minimal schooling is covered). The state can’t afford to, so they don’t.  Outsiders just expect such care to come, as a sort of compensation, with living under communism.  But China is a totalitarian state that uses capitalism to keep it functional;  capitalism helps the state maintain conditions for its people that are just prosperous enough to keep the single party in power.  It features the joys of living in a police state simultaneous with the hazards of living under unregulated capitalism, where there is little consumer protection and no safety net for its people.