Despite flaws, health care in US provides reasons to be thankful

A documentary about health care in rural China puts things in perspective for one ophthalmologist.

Issue: January 10, 2012

ByMalcolm R. Ing, MD

Once in a while, I am reminded how lucky we are to live in the United States and how fortunate we are that our health care system works despite its imperfections, at least most of the time.

This fact was reaffirmed recently when I had the opportunity to see an outstanding documentary at the Hawaii International Film Festival. This film is appropriately entitled Restoring the Light. Directed and produced by Carol Liu, a young Los Angeles filmmaker, the 55-minute film was shot in China and centered on rural families with multiple medical problems.

This clearly is not the view of China that evokes visions of bullet trains, gleaming skyscrapers and successful entrepreneurs who race around in their brand-new Ferraris. This is a realistic film of contemporary rural China, revealing grinding poverty and hard-working peasants trying to eke out a living from a very unforgiving land without the social safety nets currently enjoyed by U.S. citizens.

Ms. Liu revealed that China has the second largest economy in the world, but 60% of its people live in the countryside where, in her words, “poverty and inadequate health care persist.” As we learn in the film, “inadequate health care” is an understatement, at least for the families that are chronicled.

The story begins with a dedicated Chinese eye surgeon, so devoted to serving the underprivileged that he sells his home to establish a mobile medical unit to take his practice directly to the underserved.

One of the families that accepts his offer of eye care includes a grandmother who, by necessity, must stop working in the fields because she is going blind from cataracts. This type of blindness can be cured by a modern surgical eye procedure that is readily available in the United States. Before meeting the idealistic ophthalmologist, the family had been unable to deal with the problem because they were so poor and could barely feed themselves, much less afford to travel to an urban center to receive care from an eye surgeon.

The movie is bittersweet. I will not give the story away, but suffice it to say, it does not end well for some of the protagonists.

Although the Chinese government is currently incapable of delivering adequate health care to its citizens, there are heroes in this story.

These realistically filmed peasants include a family’s youngest daughter, who suffers from epilepsy and cares for her blind brother, and a talented art student, who foregoes an amputation of her diseased foot to save funds for her education.

There are many lessons to be learned from Ms. Liu’s film. While China has come a long way toward modernization, there is a stark disparity between the small percentage of the population that becomes relatively rich in the cities and the poor that dwell in the countryside, many with a plethora of medical issues.

This is especially poignant for me. As an ophthalmologist who has been in the practice of eye surgery in the United States for more than 25 years and teaches as a clinical professor of ophthalmology at the John A. Burns School of Medicine for at least 20 of those years, I know that the tragedies documented by Ms. Liu would not occur in the United States.

Our health care system in the United States, despite its shortcomings, does indeed continue to take care of the young, the blind and the infirm of all ages, even if the patients are indigent.

We should be thankful and proud that, in this great nation, we take care of our citizens.

Malcolm R. Ing, MD, can be reached at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children, 1319 Punahou St., Suite 1110, Honolulu, HI 96826; 808-955-5951; fax: 808-941-8646; email: ingm002@hawaii.rr.com.
Disclosure: No products or companies are mentioned that would require financial disclosure.