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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Let's not adopt the Chinese system:

• In the absence of government funding, hospitals . . . have been turned into pharmacies on steroids, with more than half their recurrent funding from the sale of drugs. Much of the rest comes through diagnostic tests, which explains why some Chinese hospitals have better equipment than in the west.
  
  The system has in-built incentives for everyone to sell as many drugs as possible, including doctors, whose salaries are tied to prescription targets. As a result, rich China gets good hospitals, while poor China is lucky to get a clinic. It would be easy to blame the hospitals for shaking down their patients at the front door, but they have to grab money where they can. . . .
  
  The most common prescription is for antibiotics, with devastating effect. The health ministry announced the results of a survey this week showing about 70 per cent of child pneumonia patients were resistant to drugs used to treat the disease, because of overuse of antibiotics. In three children's hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, the country's wealthiest cities, the figure climbed to 90 per cent.
  
  . . . A Chinese journalist visited 10 hospitals this year and, pretending to be a patient, provided tea in the place of a requested urine sample. Six of the hospitals said they had discovered "blood cells" in the "urine" and immediately prescribed drugs.

FT