This thing,happened in my hometown. what a shame.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BEIJING, Nov. 12 — Some 2,000 people mobbed and ransacked a hospital in southwestern China on Friday in a dispute over medical fees and shoddy health care practices, a human rights group said Sunday.

Skip to next paragraph

The New York Times

Guang’an was under tight control Sunday in the wake of unrest.

Readers’ Opinions

Forum: Asian Politics

At least 10 people were injured when the police broke up the demonstration at Guang’an City No. 2 People’s Hospital, said the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, based in Hong Kong. The area, in Sichuan Province, was described as under tight police control on Sunday, with at least five people detained on suspicion of instigating a riot.

The unrest erupted after a 3-year-old boy died in the hospital, where he had been taken for emergency treatment after ingesting pesticides. Reports conflicted about how much medical care he had received.

The human rights group said in a faxed statement that essential medical care had been denied the boy until his grandfather, who was taking care of him, could pay. The boy died after the grandfather left to raise money, the group said.

An official report from the New China News Agency confirmed that a dispute over medical fees had occurred at the hospital, but also said that doctors there had treated the boy even though the grandfather had not been able to pay the $82 bill.

Local residents who heard about the incident staged a demonstration at the hospital that quickly turned violent. People smashed windows and destroyed equipment at the six-story building. The human rights group said three police vans had been overturned.

The New China News Agency did not report the demonstration or the police crackdown in its dispatch, saying only that there had been a dispute over fees. The state-run Sichuan Daily newspaper reported Sunday that local authorities were looking into the matter and “attached great importance” to investigating the causes of the boy’s death.

Medical costs are a major issue for tens of millions of people in Chinese cities and hundreds of millions in the countryside who have no medical insurance and no public safety net to cover the soaring cost of care.

The Communist Party-controlled government once offered rudimentary medical care for nominal prices in the countryside. But hospitals were left largely to fend for themselves in the expanding market economy of the 1990s.

Many ceased providing even emergency care for people who could not pay hospital fees in cash before treatment.

Providing better access to health care and education and reducing the country’s growing urban-rural wealth gap have become part of President Hu Jintao’s pledge to build a “harmonious society.”

But the government has provided relatively little money for hospital care in poor areas. It has experimented with social insurance for people who do not work for major companies, including most of the 800 million classified as peasants, but has not introduced a national plan.

China has also been grappling with a wave of social unrest in recent years. Riots involving thousands of people protesting confiscation of land, environmental pollution, official corruption and other issues are no longer uncommon.

The government canceled agricultural taxes and promised to spend more on rural development in response. But rural residents still face weak or nonexistent public services and have regular disputes with local officials over repossession of their farmland for development.

The number of violent protests declined by 22 percent in the first nine months of 2006, to 17,900, one measure the police use indicates.