It is truly quite dramatic that Yuan Tengfei—the man who used to praise the American healthcare system to high heaven from his teaching podium—completely broke down over an ER bill less than two months after landing in Texas. His child went to the hospital for a blister on their foot, and the bill came out to $13,500—equivalent to nearly 100,000 RMB. He himself lay in the ER for a few hours, which cost over $5,000; even after insurance, he had to pay over $1,000 out of pocket. You see, the boomerang of “free Western healthcare” that this gentleman had been chanting about for decades showed absolutely no mercy when it finally struck back.
Interestingly, Yuan Tengfei’s situation is cut from the exact same cloth as that of “Donut King” Wang Weiheng before him. Back in China, “Donut” was at least considered middle class. He ripped up his passport and fled to the U.S., only to be hit with a bill of over $5,000 for a single ER visit. Later, a rear-end collision saddled him with another $11,000 in damages. Now, he is out on the streets of San Francisco holding up protest signs.
If you ask me, what these two have in common is that they genuinely believed the stories they fabricated themselves. After cursing America as a “garbage country,” Yuan Tengfei added a line saying he blamed his poor English for his inability to integrate into mainstream society. Just listen to that: after being slapped in the face by systemic pricing, his first reaction was to fault his own language skills. In the eyes of Hainiu (the author/commentator), this reaction proves exactly one thing: the America in his mind was never a real place where one actually needs to check bills, verify insurance networks, or distinguish between different types of emergency care; it was merely a political symbol used as a contrast. Symbols don’t send bills, but reality does.
So, just how ridiculously expensive is American healthcare? Let’s look at the numbers. Total annual healthcare spending in the U.S. has now soared to around $5.7 trillion, accounting for nearly 18% of its GDP. To put that in perspective, the average for other developed nations in the OECD is just over 9%. If you were to isolate the U.S. healthcare industry as an independent economy, it would rank third in the world—larger than the entire annual GDP of Germany, Japan, or India. Where does all that money go? The average annual income of an American doctor exceeds $300,000, while their counterparts in the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden make only half or even a third of that. The wool comes off the sheep’s back, so this money naturally has to be fleeced from the patients.
More importantly, there is the American medical-industrial complex. With hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and pharmacy lobbying groups all tied together, no one has any incentive to push prices down. Insurance premiums rise year after year. A couple in Utah paid less than $500 a month for health insurance in 2025, but that figure jumped straight to nearly $2,200 in 2026. Meanwhile, according to American surveys, nearly 40% of adults cannot scrape together $400 for an emergency. If locals can barely stay afloat, it is out of the question for newly arrived immigrants.
It is also worth mentioning that Yuan Tengfei’s trip came with a complimentary speeding ticket and a lawsuit. Because the doctors were too slow, he languished in the ER for hours. Seeing that he was going to be late to pick up his child, he stepped on the gas, only to be pulled over by the police. Now, he has to appear in court as a defendant in November. With bills and a court summons hitting him at the same time, his remark on WeChat Moments about “returning to China to surrender if worst comes to worst” might have been vented in anger, but it carried a hint of genuine, heartfelt despair. Sharp-eyed netizens also noticed that QR codes for donations have recently been prominently displayed under his videos, as he relies on tips from domestic audiences in China to recoup his losses. Having moved to America, he still has to make his money from back home—this picture in itself explains a lot.
Ultimately, Yuan Tengfei and “Donut” fell into the exact same pit. They spent half their lives portraying the other side of the ocean as paradise, yet they never bothered to check the paradise’s ER price list. The fact that American healthcare is expensive is no secret within the U.S.; medical debt accounts for over 60% of all bankruptcy filings each year. For a man who branded himself as an “enlightener” to have absolutely no concept of this only proves that he never used the goods he was selling.
Now that he has physically gone overseas and experienced the taste of imported “consumables” firsthand, whether he curses on social media or sets up donation QR codes, that $13,500 bill won’t drop a single zero just because he bought a few guns. This is the reality that “runners” face—so don’t be fooled by the rhetoric of those blind Western-worshipers online.
