Two NYT Reports That Are Not in cn.nytimes.com

choi

My comment: I do not visit cn.nytimes.com regularly; when I do, I bring a translation of an English-language report of New York Times to your attention. For some time (probably a week or so, during which I tried to find a translation for (1) ), the cn.nytimes.com has seemed stale (does not renew its content much). Today at last, I determine that the cn.nytimes.com is not going to translate (1). So I am bringing two reports to your attention.

(1) Sui-Lee Wee, Lines, Bribes and Violence: A Healthcare Crisis; China faces struggle to add primary doctors. New York Times, Oct 1, 2018 (front page).
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/ ... h-care-doctors.html
(Among scalpers, the lines to get a medical appointment with a specialist at Beijing's top hospitals started well before dawn. "The long lines, a standard feature of hospital visits in China, are a symptom of a health care system in crisis. * * * China has one general practitioner [or primary-care doctors] for every 6,666 people, compared with the international standard of one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, according to the World Health Organization." A general practitioner in Shanghai, Dr Huang Dazhi is paid about $1,340 a month [but he was not a specialist -- as the NYT report asserted -- in the American sense, because he was an internist only for the first year after medical school]. "China is pushing each household to sign a contract with a family doctor by 2020 and subsidizing patients' visits. General practitioners will also have the authority to make appointments directly with top specialists, rather than leaving patients to make their own at hospitals. * * * Dr Yang Lan has signed up more than 200 patients, and monitors their health for about $1,220 a month. From her office in the Xinhua community health center 新华社区卫生服务中心 [address: 上海市长宁区新华路668号], a run-down place * * * She [Yang] sees 50 to 60 patients in a workday of about seven and a half hours. In the United States, a family doctor has 83 'patient encounters' in a 45-hour workweek, according to a 2017 survey by the American Academy of Family Physicians. That's about 16 patients in a nine-hour workday")

My comment:
(a) This long report talks about the same old issues about China's healthcare system. The quotation and summary are all you need to know.  
(b) In the best hospitals in Taiwan, there were long lines, too. (I use past tense to describe my observation, though I did not join the line (because I did not suffer aby major disease.). Doctors in those hospital could not understand why. For example, before I left Taiwan in 1984, Veterans General Hospital 荣民总医院 (at the time there was no branch; now it is 台北荣民总医院, to differentiate it from 台中荣总、高雄荣总 (branches which were elevated to 台北荣总's co-equals) saw 5,000 out patients 门诊病人 daily (except Sunday), mostly by residents. Doctors believed the high number was due to veterans;s paying nothing for a visit or any treatment (pharmaceutical or surgical).   

Regarding 門診人數.
(i) 醫療業務統計. 台北荣民总医院, undated
https://www.vghtpe.gov.tw/Fpage.action?muid=1487&fid=1302
(醫師 1294; 護理人員3034; In 2017: 門診(人次)(含門診健診) 2,483,656 + 急診(人次) 83,379; 總病床數 2947)
(ii) 2017 Annual Report, National Taiwan University Hospital  2017台大醫院年報, page 38
https://www.ntuh.gov.tw/About_Us ... %B9%B4%E5%A0%B1.pdf
("2017 年工作天數為 276.5 天，共計 25 個醫療科部開設門診， 平均每日門診量為 9,298 人次，總門診人 次較去年 [2016] 成長 0.31%")

My estimates (based on eight doctors a day at an out-patient clinic for each department) would be 10 minutes a patient. That is what I observed in 台北荣总 in early 1980s.

(2) Alexandra Stevenson and Matthew Goldstein, US Says Chinese Firm Pursued Arms Deals; A plan to help link a Chinese bank an Iranian company in violation of sanction. New York Times, Oct 4, 2018, at page B1.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/ ... a-weapons-iran.html

Quote:

"In a filing on Tuesday [Oct 2] in a federal court in New York [City], prosecutors said that * * * Patrick Ho * * * had discussed using the company's [the report identifies the company as CEFC, without providing the full name -- and yet the photo with this (print) report shows China Energy Fund Committee; the online photo is identical but the CEFC logo is cropped out] connections to help sell weapons to Chad, Qatar and Libya. The prosecutors also accused Mr Ho of exploring whether CEFC could serve as a middleman for an Iranian company to gain access to funds from a Chinese bank under international sanctions.  Edward Kim, a lawyer for Mr Ho, declined to comment on Wednesday [Oct 3]. CEFC did not respond to a request for comment. Federal prosecutors did not say whether any of these deals went through and did not press additional charges.  But the allegations add a new dimension to what is currently known about CEFC.

"federal prosecutors alleged last year that Mr Ho * * * offered millions of dollars in bribes to President Idriss Déby of Chad and Uganda's foreign minister, Sam Kutesa, in exchange for oil rights in the two countries. * * * The new allegations [on Oct 2] focus on what federal prosecutors said was email correspondence between Mr Ho and Cheikh Gadio, a former Senegalese foreign minister. Prosecutors have accused Mr Ho of trying to bribe Mr Déby by presenting him with $2 million in cash hidden in several gift boxes. Prosecutors agreed to drop charges against Mr Gadio last month and signed a non-prosecution agreement with him. In return Mr Gadio has agreed to testify at the trial about his knowledge of Mr Ho's attempt to bribe the president of Chad, who prosecutors said had rejected the cash hidden in the boxes. * * * In excerpts from the emails submitted by prosecutors on Tuesday to bolster their claims about arms dealings, Mr Gadio is said to have appealed to Mr Ho to help Mr Déby crush the Islamist group Boko Haram.

"according to prosecutors[:] * * * In 2014, he [Ho] discussed the possibility that CEFC could act as a go-between for an Iranian company looking to buy precious metals in Hong Kong using money that had been blocked in China [my guess is it was Iranian money frozen by United Nations in a Chinese bank; the same money mentioned in quotation 1], according to email excerpts provided by prosecutors.