While the article emphasis on chaos and short time with China's doctor, they are very accessible, 2 USD you visit a fully trained doctor at top hospital, have your CT scan done the same day with 50 USD even if you pay out of packet.
As for AI, my personal experience is ChatGPT and Gemini is more effective then DeepSeek for healthcare issues. I do hope DeepSeek or Doubao can catch up.
Yes, but they are inconvenient, you had to line up in the morning for an appointment when I lived in Beijing, and scalpers would commonly grab most of the tickets early to sell to you for a few hundred RMB. I hear they have a better system now, something based on WeChat without the scalping.
Private hospitals were mostly staffed by doctors from Eastern Europe and Iran, at least the one I went to (UFH in Lido, Beijing), lots of rich Chinese customers. It was comfortable and you just made an appointment on the phone. You got to wait in a nice waiting room with a plush couch rather than a concrete brutaleski waiting room with plastic chairs, private birthing rooms for babies rather than a community birthing room.
I’m sure that’s a state owned hospital and not a private hospital. The last time I went to a private hospital in Beijing for my yearly checkup I paid 100 RMB for my part of the checkup cost (I also had private local insurance and was eligible to use public hospitals, but never had time for that).