Nobody likes scalpers.
They lurk outside concert venues and sports arenas pitching tickets, legitimate ones if you’re lucky, at ridiculous prices for sold out events.
But in China, you can even find these vultures perched outside hospitals.
Several Chinese hospitals offer tickets which determine the order patients are seen during non-emergency visits in order to prevent disorder that could arise from line cutting. Often, they are sold for a price. Scalpers, with their scheming wit, found a market here and decided to buy and re-sell these tickets for a profit.
One woman, who was seeking medical help for her paralyzed mother, had enough of scalpers and blasted them on a video posted online Tuesday.
The woman said she visited Guang’anmen Hospital in central Beijing, where a scalper offered her a ticket at 4500 renminbi or $700 after raising its price from 300 renminbi.
In the video, she shouts: “My God, for average people to see a doctor takes so much money, so much energy!”
She said she was waiting in line so her mother could see a prominent doctor of internal medicine. The hospital later said in a statement that it had made arraignments so her mother could see another doctor as “not to affect the normal medical order and treatment of other patients.”
The video went viral and people began to post about similar experiences on social media.
On Weibo, also known as China’s Twitter, one user posted: “Of course these scalpers are awful, but it’s the system that creates them.”
A search on the platform can also bring you to accounts offering tickets for hospital visits at Guang’anmen and other hospitals in Beijing.
The woman said she rented a room at a basement near the hospital for 130 renminbi a day. She carries her mother on her back to see the doctor.
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