[Video] Ticket Scalping In China’s Overcrowded Hospitals

February 14th, 2016 | by CoNN

Ticket scalping is a phenomenon where people buy a limited number of tickets that have a fixed price, and go on to resell them at a much higher price to those who can afford it. By being earlier, they can buy tickets before those who actually wish to use them- raising prices by providing artificial demand and artificially constricting supply.

In China, ticket scalping isn’t limited to concerts though. The most lucrative tickets tend to be more closely associated with matters of health.

Hospitals in China require non-emergency patients to first get a ticket to determine their position in the queue. This isn’t exactly a procedure unique to China. What is unique is the fact that most hospitals require patients to pay for these tickets, and demand for them is exceedingly high. So high that scalpers have gotten away with charging 20-30 times the price to people who hoped to shorten their wait.

The New York Times notes that a female patient was recorded complaining about the extraordinary price she had to pay for a ticket, which cost her 4,500 RMB or 700 USD.

“My God, for average people to see a doctor takes so much money, so much energy,” she screams in the video below. She was reportedly waiting in line at the Guang’anmen hospital so her mother could see a doctor of internal medicine. The hospital allowed her mother to see another specialist so that the “normal medical order and treatment of other patients” was not interrupted.

The Beijing Youth Daily says that she had to rent a room near the hospital, and had to carry her mother on her back to and from the hospital.

“My mother is still ill and paralyzed in bed,” she said. “I need to take care of her and only wish to get her properly treated. I don’t want that much attention.”

This NowThis video explains the problem of hospital ticket scalping:

The overcrowding is such a problem that people have even taken to sleeping while waiting for their turn.