'It can't be done'

We started approaching various officials in the Ministry of Health with this idea in the early 1990s, but the suggestion of private, for-profit healthcare in a socialist country was one that was mostly dismissed as a non-sequitur and a non-starter.

The concept, we were told, "could not be". We were either politely dismissed or summarily dismissed, until we met the foresighted leadership of the Academy of Medical Sciences, who helped us to make the case "from the inside" to the highest levels of the Ministry of Health.

We explained that having such a facility was an opportunity to examine approaches to healthcare gleaned from abroad and to see how it played out right here on Chinese soil.

Besides, we were only proposing a very small facility and at the time the officials took comfort that we would primarily be treating foreigners and, in fact, the existence of such a facility would prove a comfort to foreign tourists, investors and others considering traveling to Beijing or taking up temporary residence there.

We had been taking scores of delegations of Chinese public health officials and public hospital executives to the US each year to see for themselves some of the American palaces of modern healthcare.