'White-gowned angels' lose their wings
By Tian Yi (Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2005-12-06 09:05

The following story surely makes a promising candidate for the Most Absurd Story of the Year.

Weng Wenhui, a retired school teacher in Heilongjiang Province, was sent to the 2nd Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University for malignant lymphoma on June 1. He stayed in the intensive care unit for 66 days, and when he died on August 6, his family received a medical bill totalling 1.397 million yuan (US$175,000).

Let's break down this 1.40 million yuan a bit.

Weng received 94 blood transfusions, in other words, 9,400 milliliters of blood which was double the blood capacity of a normal person, in a single day on July 30. At least this is what his medical record says.

On July 31, he received 106 bottles of drip infusion, 20 bottles of glucose infusion, and 10,000 milliliters of blood transfusion. Again, on his medical records.

The blood transfusion alone cost him 22,197 yuan, by the way.

On August 8, he was on a phlegm sampling test. This one may sound reasonable, except that he had been dead for two days.

The list goes on and on but these are enough for us to figure out where the 1.40 million bill came from.

Other than the outrageous bill, the hospital required Weng's family to buy medicines from other channels for emergency use, which cost them another 4.1 million.

The family said that they are now seriously doubtful how the hospital used these medicines.

According to last Thursday's National Business Daily, an investigation team sent by the central government has started working on the case.

I was shocked again by how greedy our "white-gowned angels" can be. By again I mean I had come across another similar case the day before I read about this story. The medical bill didn't look so overwhelming in that story, but the doctors were just as despicable.

It was about how doctors at a local hospital in Shanghai diagnosed a pregnant woman and her husband to be infertile. The two doctors bluffed them into believing they had serious sexually transmitted infections.

Despite the different types of alleged infections, the doctors sent them to get the same treatment.

The couple quit the treatment on the fifth day — the doctors told them that the treatment might not work but only after they had spent over 37,000 yuan, mostly borrowed from relatives and friends.

Here is the "best" part of the story: The wife was later found to have been pregnant during her treatment. The couple now have to decide whether they should keep the long-awaited baby or not — it's not known yet what effects the medicines the woman took will have on the unborn child.

Some people say the unsuccessful Medicare reform should be held responsible for the wanton misbehavior of some doctors and that it's too harsh to blame it all on doctors.

But isn't there a line that all doctors must not cross under any circumstance?

When some of them go out of control and turn into blood-suckers, or even potential baby-killers, they deserve to be the objects of legal punishment and moral censure.