Replies to post #101007 on Biotech Values

[drbio45]

Very informative information about China impending problem

I think we should open up our plan to allow the poor rural chinese to be protected under our system. Maybe we can open up our medicaid system to serice them. We are looking to focus our resources on the global economy.

[DewDiligence]

Chinese Hospitals Are Battlegrounds of Discontent

[See #msg-53041685 for a related story.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/world/asia/12hospital.html

›August 12, 2010
By SHARON LaFRANIERE

SHENYANG, China — Forget the calls by many Chinese patients for more honest, better-qualified doctors. What this city’s 27 public hospitals really needed, officials decided last month, was police officers.

And not just at the entrance, but as deputy administrators. The goal: to keep disgruntled patients and their relatives from attacking the doctors.

The decision was quickly reversed after Chinese health experts assailed it, arguing that the police were public servants, not doctors’ personal bodyguards.

But officials in this northeastern industrial hub of nearly eight million people had a point. Chinese hospitals are dangerous places to work. In 2006, the last year the Health Ministry published statistics on hospital violence, attacks by patients or their relatives injured more than 5,500 medical workers.

“I think the police should have a permanent base here,” said a neurosurgeon at Shengjing Hospital. “I always feel this element of danger.”

In June alone, a doctor was stabbed to death in Shandong Province by the son of a patient who had died of liver cancer. Three doctors were severely burned in Shanxi Province when a patient set fire to a hospital office. A pediatrician in Fujian Province was also injured after leaping out a fifth-floor window to escape angry relatives of a newborn who had died under his care.

Over the past year, families of deceased patients have forced doctors to don mourning clothes as a sign of atonement for poor care, and organized protests to bar hospital entrances. Four years ago, 2,000 people rioted at a hospital after reports that a 3-year-old was refused treatment because his grandfather could not pay $82 in upfront fees. The child died.

Such episodes are to some extent standard fare in China, where protests over myriad issues have been on the rise, and officials at all levels of government are on guard against unrest that could spiral and threaten the Communist Party’s power.

Doctors and nurses say the strains in the relations between them and patients’ relatives are often the result of unrealistic expectations by poor families who, having traveled far and exhausted their savings on care, expect medical miracles.

But the violence also reflects much wider discontent with China’s public health care system. Although the government, under Communist leadership, once offered rudimentary health care at nominal prices, it pulled back in the 1990s, leaving hospitals largely to fend for themselves in the new market economy.

By 2000, the World Health Organization ranked China’s health system as one of the world’s most inequitable, 188th among 191 nations. Nearly two of every five sick people went untreated. Only one in 10 had health insurance.

Over the past seven years, the state has intervened anew, with notable results. It has narrowed if not eliminated the gap in public health care spending with other developing nations of similar income levels, health experts say, pouring tens of billions of dollars into government insurance plans and hospital construction.

The World Bank estimates that more than three in four Chinese are now insured, although coverage is often basic. And far more people are getting care: the World Bank says hospital admissions in rural counties have doubled in five years.

“That is a steep, steep increase,” said Jack Langenbrunner, human development coordinator at the World Bank’s Beijing office. “We haven’t seen that in any other country.”

Still, across much of China, the quality of care remains low. Almost half the nation’s doctors have no better than a high school degree, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Many village doctors did not make it past junior high school.

Primary care is scarce, so public hospitals — notorious for raising costs — are typically patients’ first stop in cities, even for minor ailments. One survey estimated that a fifth of hospital patients suffer from no more than a cold or flu. Chinese health experts estimate that a third to a half of patients are hospitalized for no good reason.

Once admitted, patients are at risk of needless surgery; for instance, one of every two Chinese newborns is delivered by Caesarean sections, a rate three times higher than health experts recommend.

Patients appear to be even more likely to get useless prescriptions. Drug sales are hospitals’ second biggest source of revenue [#msg-53041685], and many offer incentives that can lead doctors to overprescribe or link doctors’ salaries to the money they generate from prescriptions and costly diagnostic tests. Some pharmaceutical companies offer additional under-the-table inducements for prescribing drugs, doctors and experts say.

An article in November in The Guangzhou Daily in southeastern China cited one particularly egregious example of unnecessary treatment: a patient paid roughly $95 for a checkup, several injections and a dozen different drugs, including pills for liver disease. He had a cold.

The Health Ministry has ordered hospitals to lower prices of specific drugs 23 times in a decade, but the World Bank says hospitals have responded, in part, by ordering higher priced alternatives.

Some experts fear that the newly opened spigot of government insurance money will inspire further excesses, rather than reduce the financial risk of illness for most Chinese. Indeed, one study shows only a slight drop in the share of household spending devoted to health care — 8.2 percent in 2008, down from 8. 7 percent in 2003.

“Their protection may not really be improving with insurance,” said Mr. Langenbrunner of the World Bank. “That is the scary part.”

Doctors seem as unhappy as patients. They complain that they are underpaid, undervalued and mistrusted. One in four suffers from depression, and fewer than two of every three believe that their patients respect them, a survey by Peking University concluded in October.

In June, more than 100 doctors and nurses in Fujian Province staged their own sit-in after their hospital paid $31,000 to the family of a patient who died. The doctors were upset because after the patient died the relatives took a doctor hostage, setting off a bottle-throwing melee that injured five employees.

Like some other cities, Shenyang has been seeking ways to ward off disturbances, including setting up hospital mediation centers. Still, the city reported 152 “severe conflicts” between patients and doctors last year.

At Hospital No. 5, the memory of a January attack remains fresh. After a doctor referred a patient with a temperature to a fever clinic — standard practice in China — frustrated relatives beat the doctor and several nurses with a mop and sticks.

Now a banner strung across the hospital’s main lobby exhorts, “Everyone participate in the sorting out of the law and order problem!”‹

[DewDiligence]

Global Urbanization 1950-2020

These plots, from a recent CC by the Brazilian mining company,
VALE, capture the essence of The Global Demographic Tailwind.
(See #msg-56407145 and #msg-53041685 for related articles.)

[DewDiligence]

For Many Chinese, New Wealth Means a New Face

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/world/asia/24beijing.html

›April 24, 2011
By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — Even in a blue-striped hospital bathrobe, her face wiped clean of makeup and marked with purple lines by her surgeon, the young woman who called herself Devil embodied an image of beauty widely admired in China: large, luminous eyes, a delicate nose and softly sculpted cheekbones.

But her jaw line? Too square for her liking. So the 22-year-old television reporter recently traveled from a coastal province to a private hospital in downtown Beijing to have it reshaped — for about $6,000. Her boyfriend, a 29-year-old businessman wearing designer eyeglasses, picked up the bill.

“I am not nervous at all,” said Devil (the English first name she chose for herself, and the only one she would reveal) as she awaited surgery at Evercare Aikang hospital in downtown Beijing. “I will look more sophisticated and exquisite.”

The breathtaking pace of transformation for upwardly mobile Chinese — from bicycles to cars, village to city, housebound holidays to ski vacations — now extends to faces. In just a decade, cosmetic and plastic surgery has become the fourth most popular way to spend discretionary income in China, according to Ma Xiaowei, China’s vice health minister. Only houses, cars and travel rank higher, he said.

No official figures exist, but the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated in 2009 that China ranked third, behind the United States and Brazil, with more than two million operations annually. And the number of operations is doubling every year, Mr. Ma said at a conference organized by the Health Ministry in November.

“We must recognize that plastic and cosmetic surgery has now become a common service, aimed at the masses,” he said.

Face-lifts and wrinkle-removal treatments are in vogue, just as in the West. But at Evercare, which runs a chain of cosmetic-surgery hospitals in China, two-fifths of patients are in their 20s, said Li Bin, the general manager and one of the founders.

Nationally, the most requested surgeries have nothing to do with age: The No. 1 operation is designed to make eyes appear larger by adding a crease in the eyelid, forming what is called a double eyelid, said Zhao Zhenmin, secretary general of the government-run Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics.

The second most popular operation raises the bridge of the nose to make it more prominent — the opposite of the typical nose job in the West. Third is the reshaping of the jaw to make it narrower and longer, he said.

The youthful patients include job applicants hoping to enhance their prospects in the work force, teenagers who received cosmetic surgery as a high school graduation present and even middle school students, most of whom want eye jobs, surgeons say.

China’s regulatory system, by all accounts, has not kept up. At the conference in Beijing in November, Mr. Ma, the vice health minister, said the situation “can even be called neglect.”

Out of 11 clinics and hospitals offering cosmetic or plastic surgery that were inspected late last year, he said, fewer than half met national standards. Employees lacked professional credentials, he said; equipment and materials were subpar. Beauty parlors are flagrant violators, illegally administering Botox injections and performing eyelid surgery.

Mr. Ma likened the industry to a medical “disaster zone,” with frequent accidents. His point was underscored when a 24-year-old former contestant on the Chinese reality show “Super Girl” died after her windpipe filled with blood during an operation to reshape her jaw in Hubei Province.

Health officials demanded an inquiry. But Mr. Zhao, who also serves as the vice director of Beijing’s government-run Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery Hospital, said it was impossible to gather evidence because the body was quickly cremated — a common practice in China when hospitals privately settle malpractice claims.

“Personally speaking, I think this is pretty despicable,” he said. “We need to get to the bottom of such cases in order to protect people in the future.”

The shortcomings of China’s medical system are hardly limited to cosmetic and plastic surgery. But the industry now generates an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue, and the government has begun to take note. Officials say new regulations will probably be issued this year.

One implicit goal is to halt the flow of Chinese patients to better-established hospitals in South Korea. Mr. Ma estimates that Chinese make up 30 percent of cosmetic surgery patients in Seoul.

For now, many beauty salons, like one downtown Beijing branch of a major chain, are capitalizing on the lack of oversight. One recent afternoon, a 62-year-old woman in a white coat who described herself as an internist said she could summon a doctor who could give a visitor double eyelids in 20 minutes about $180, a fraction of the standard hospital fee.

“Immediately you will look different,” she said.

“Strictly speaking, this thing is not allowed,” she added. “But why do we have it? Because many people want to look good and find the price of the procedure too high and they can’t afford it.”

Of two dozen Beijing beauty salons contacted by phone, 15 said they offered either double-eyelid surgery or Botox injections or both, along with manicures, pedicures and facials.

At the other end of the spectrum is Evercare’s Aikang hospital, with a grand piano in the lobby, an underground tunnel for patients who want privacy and surgeons like Dr. Wang Jiguang, who has performed thousands of operations. Patients younger than 19 are told to return when they are old enough to make a decision about a permanent change to their looks.

Mr. Li of Evercare, a 46-year-old former government journalist, said the typical procedure cost between about $1,500 and $3,000. Having renovated one part of their face, many patients find the lure of more work irresistible. Between 30 to 40 percent return, he said.

Chen Xiaomeng, a petite 25-year-old, said her double-eyelid surgery two months ago made her look less sleepy — an effect she once tried to achieve by using thin strips of clear tape, available at 7-Elevens throughout Beijing. Now she is considering a nose job.

She made no effort to hide her operation from her colleagues at a Beijing advertising and entertainment agency or from her friends, five of whom have undergone the same procedure.

“Cosmetic surgery is now accepted in practically every household,” she said cheerily as she picked at her lunch. “It is not a big deal any more.”

Not everyone is so open. Down the hall from Devil’s V.I.P. suite, a Chinese military officer had secretly arranged an operation that cost about $9,000 to reshape her 23-year-old daughter’s jaw. First the officer told her husband that their daughter was traveling with friends. Then she called him from the hospital and asked him to deliver chicken soup to help the daughter’s sore throat. The father found the girl in bed with a heavily bandaged jaw and a swollen face, barely able to speak.

“She looked very pretty before, but now Chinese want to be perfect,” said the mother, who refused to give her name. “If she had my jaw,” she added, “I wouldn’t have allowed her to have this operation.”

After a classmate had her jaw reshaped, the mother said, her daughter pleaded for the operation until finally she gave in.

A 23-year-old bank employee from Harbin in northeastern China said she deliberated for a week before she underwent a $15,000 operation to reshape her cheekbones and jaw line. Her other thought, she said, had been to open a Starbucks with her savings.

“It was a snap decision,” she said, seated on her hospital bed, her face swathed in bandages. “I was curious to see what I would look like.”

Her family had no idea. Asked how she would explain her new face to them, she paused before replying, “I am right now trying to figure that out.”‹

[DewDiligence]

Tale of Two Chinas—update on an old story with a twist that's bullish for drug/biotech companies:

#msg-117427332