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High Hospital Fee for Super-convenience: Good Bargain or Not?

Some first-class hospitals in Shanghai starts to offer luxury services for the rich and the busy VIPs (very important person). But actually, these luxury services have attracted more middle-income people than VIPs.

Common people say when choosing between money and convenience and time, they had better choose to change money for the one-stop service.

Registration fee for a luxurious clinical consulation is priced at 100 yuan (US$12), ten times the normal fee of about 10 yuan. Other expenditures for medicine and medical examinations all have the same price in common treatment as in luxurious treatment.

Then what's special in these services that temps so many common people to squander their money in?

That's the convenience and comfortness.

After one pays 100 yuan as registration fee. Whoever specialist the patient wants will come immediately at his or her call.

The patient will also be attended by kind nurses directly to the clinics and each examination rooms. One can talk with the nurse and the doctor for as long time as one needs and when waiting for examinations, nurses will serve magazines and water kindly. All kinds of examinations will also be available for patients of luxurious services on the same registration day to save their time. Besides, such patients can meet the best specialiest in the hospital.

With so many advantages, common people, who can't stand up any more with the impatient doctors and nurses and the many refusal saying that such such examinations can't be done on the same day and one needs to come another day and registrate once more, make up their minds to change money for convenience.

Many of their input paid out at last.

A pregnant woman said she not only got convenience but a good bargain. She calculated by herself how much she spend for the luxurious services and for common treatment. The spending in each luxurious treatment turns out to be even less than the spending summed up in several times' common treatments.

Patients of common treatment generally needs to come to hospital scores of times before they get the prescription and medicine from the hospital. Examinations needs reservation and each reservation needs registration.

(eastday.com June 4, 2002)

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