Health Care In Taiwan

I live in Taiwan where we had two kids delivered two years apart for about $12,000NT, or 400US. That included the delivery, and three days care for mother and child in a private room.

She then spent the rest of her month off from work (paid) in a maternity center where she was fed 6 meals a day and the babies had round-the-clock care. It was clean, quiet, and the food was excellent. This was a private hospital, though, and it cost a whopping $500US or thereabouts. To insure my family of four, around US$90 is deducted from my paycheck every month. We go to see the doctor whenever we need to, and see whichever doctor we choose. Our family physician will recommend a specialist if needed, or I can just turn up at the hospital and ask to see a specialist. Each doctor's visit costs between $3-$5. Trips to the emergency room are unavoidable, but with a fifteen-dollar price tag, it's not an agonizing decision to make whether to stay at home to see if the swelling will go down, or go ahead and get an X-ray to see if the pint of ice cream really did break my hand.


When my kids are sick, I don't have to wonder if it's serious enough to call the doctor's office and make an appointment for god-knows-when, instead, my wife and I take them by the doctor after work. Convenient, huh? We work evenings, but the office is open until 10 at night. What time does your doctor go home?

There are several pediatricians in our district and there are absolutely no restrictions on who we can go to see.
Do we have time for one more? My knee surgery with general anesthetic cost about twelve bucks American. The MRI had cost me four. I honestly cannot understand why so many of my countrymen are allowing themselves to get so worked up over this. There's a lot of vitriol being slung, including footage of a woman yelling "Heil Hitler" at someone who was trying to talk about the health care system in Israel. Whoa!


I have yet to hear a rational argument as to how the current system in place in the States can provide better health care than I am enjoying in Taiwan. "Death Panels" and "Socialism" are just scary sounding catch-phrases that have nothing to do with the current situation. Taiwan is not a socialist country and National Health Care would take America no further down the road to Communism than Eisenhower's Highway Projects, or NASA have. The Death Panel bureaucrats do exist, but instead of being government employees, they're the ones who work for insurance companies that decide that your grandmother's bone marrow transplant is unnecessary.


Walk into any small town convenience store in America and there next to the cash register is a jar with the picture of a young, happy, child, whose parents cannot afford to pay for his new kidney. When you argue against Health Care, you are arguing for a slow death for the children who stare up at you from the counter. Pro Life? Yes, Please.

Not Christmassy X'mas Posting.

Happy X'mas, all that.

This is not your traditional holiday fare, I realize, it's just that I heard this story earlier in the week, and now five minutes before the end of the day, I finally have a few minutes to get this down. If you were looking for an uplifting sweet & sour soup for the soul sort of entry for today, look elsewhere.

My beautiful wife delivered a healthy baby girl to us two weeks before X'mas, and in keeping with Taiwanese tradition, she is --"sequestered" is as good a word as I've been able to come up with lately for it-- at a Post Natal Care Center (PNCC) for a 25 day period following her three day stay in the OB/GYN clinic. This period of time is to allow the mother to acclimate to motherhood, and to be fed copious amounts of traditional Chinese medicinal food and to drink teas that are supposed to increase milk production. Women are not supposed to be exposed to lots of visitors, wind, the public, cold water, for obvious reasons and for feng-shui purposes. Which came first?

The PNCC is a 9 story building; there is a clinic on the first floor, a maternity clinic & delivery room are on 2 and 3. It being a hospital, there is no fourth floor (the word for "4" in Chinese sounding the same as "death" they decided not to include one in hospitals & all others would be leased out to foreigners). The fifth floor has patient bedrooms for either the clinic below, or the PNCC above. On 6 is the nursery, a waiting room, classroom, and two separate feeding rooms. One for father's to hang out with the baby, and where boobs are not normally whipped out (unless you're lucky, har har har, knowwhatImean?) Then, 7-9 are all patient bedrooms. Each floor has 9 or 10 rooms and each room has a private bathroom. Ours has one bed and a sofa, TV, fridge & wardrobe. It's a college dorm room without the cigarette smoke & the empty whiskey bottles.

Because who would smoke in a place like that, right?

Last week, a mother moved out of the room next to Maggie's. If I remember correctly, she was the Taiwanese wife of a Japanese businessman who lived in Japan. The wife returned from Japan either right before or right after giving birth. Not too clear on that part of the story, but it's not important. She came back to Taiwan for the purpose of entering the Post Natal Care Center to take care of her body and that of her child. I mean, that's why I would pay for this service.

The mother was doing something right. She produced more breastmilk than she knew what do with, much more than the child was hungry for, and she must have feared that it was going to waste, so she offered it to one of the other mothers in the women only room. I've not seen the inside of this room, as I don't have a womb, but it's the place where mothers go to feed, usually from the source, but there are also two breast pumps that are, apparently, something. The woman squeezed out her two quarts of milk and surrendered them to the nurses who stored them until they were needed to feed her child, or the child of the other mother who was also using her breast milk.

Then, she left the building to go shopping. Mitsukoshi Mall is a short hop by taxi from there, as is SOGO and Tiger City. It would take a bit longer to get to Chung-Yo, but that's surely not out of the question. Shopping in FABULOUS Taichung!

When the maids came to clean out the woman's room after her time was up, they found a month's worth of cigarette butts and a dozen whiskey bottles. Maggie walked past the room, caught a whiff and was shocked. The maid, not being one not to gossip, said that the mother had just been using the place as a hotel while she was in Taiwan, that her husband had paid for everything.

I've been hoping that the mother was offered that monster's breastmilk wasn't so thick as to give it to her child.

The PNCC and the whole concept of Early Motherhood Sequestration is without a doubt the best thing about Taiwanese society. I can stand here for an hour and mock their ice cream, their driving, their insane public spectacles such as the dancing team from the chemistry department that practices in the park by my house. But I'll sing praises about the health care provided to new mothers from the top of my building.

I don't know where the US Government would ever find the money to pay for/or subsidize this sort of a program. Pity.

OMG @ OBGYN

I was there having a baby. Well, I was there with someone who was having a baby, namely my wife. We're all ok. Gretchen Althea Batt was born 12/9 at 2332. She weighed 3.6kg and was 53cm long. There's an OMG for you.

ICFBI moment came a few hours earlier, though. I'd gone home to feed Leica and returned at about nine in the evening. On the sofa by the elevator was a father and his 6 year old son. When I walked onto the ward, I didn't see anyone hooked up to a monitor, so I assumed that the person they were with was having a C-section. She came out a few minutes later, knocked out on a gurney, and the father and son came in. Then son is running all over the place calling his mom and asking her how she feels and stuff, which I thought was a little odd. I asked my sister-in-law if she'd had a C-section. A stiff shake of the head was the answer, followed up with the mouthed word "Abortion."

I've got two wonderful kids and I'm not going to weigh in on this issue except to say Safe, Legal, & Rare. However, if it weren't for the fact that my wife was about to deliver our second child, I would have gone over and smacked the shit out of the father for bringing a young child to his younger siblings execution. And THEN letting him run all over the place, shouting, and crawling on the bed in the 30 minutes he allowed his wife to rest before taking her home.

On my Taiwan's Bottom Five List: INCONSIDERATE