Woman slices open own stomach

An old woman in Chongqing Municipality performed surgery on herself because her family couldn't afford the medical fees, Chongqing Morning Post reports.

Wu Yuanbi, 53, suffers from Budd-Chiari syndrome, a chronic condition that causes the belly to fill with fluid.

When first diagnosed 12 years ago, she and her family pooled all their savings for a procedure to release a whopping 25 kilograms of water from her midsection, yet a recent relapse saw the family too poor to afford the 50,000 yuan for a second operation.

On the evening of May 8, unable to bear the pain, she slit herself open with a knife to relieve the pressure.

After the media reported about her self-performed surgery, she was taken to a hospital in Chongqing and is now receiving treatment free of charge. 

Some neighbors said Wu could have paid 120 yuan each year for insurance, which would have saved her 60 percent in medical expenses. However Wu had declined for years to buy medical insurance because she wanted to save money.

"If I had passed away, I would have at least spared my family the trouble of looking after me," she said.

It was once common for poor rural families in China to go bankrupt after they had paid high medical costs, Wu Ming, a professor at Peking University's School of Public Health said.

But the situation improved greatly with the introduction of a national health insurance policy that is highly subsidized by the government to make basic healthcare more accessible to rural people, she added.

The policy, which was introduced around 2003, enables qualified persons to obtain insurance by paying premiums of less than 50 yuan a year. In return, beneficiaries will receive reimbursements equal to 70 percent of the cost of their inpatient medical care, according to the Ministry of Health.

According to Chongqing Morning Post, Cao Yunhui, the husband, said the family had turned on occasion to the local government for medical assistance. But the government only paid for certain procedures and a surgery to remedy a stomach ailment like what Wu suffered from was not one of them.

"They asked us to subscribe to the new rural cooperative medical scheme," Cao recalled. "We didn't bother to do the procedures that were not covered."