At 4 a.m. outside Peking Union Medical College Hospital, the queue is mostly furniture. Folding stools, plastic water bottles, knotted cloth bags packed with snacks. The objects hold places for people who arrived the night before and went home to sleep. A reporter for Beijing Youth Daily once counted the stand-ins by lamplight at Peking University First Hospital. The objects waited because the people couldn't. But a few meters away, a different transaction is happening. A woman who traveled from Heilongjiang for her mother's appointment is talking to a man near a side gate. The hospital app released today's expert slots at 4 p.m. yesterday. They were gone in under a second. The man tells her the endocrinology consultation will cost 600 yuan on top of the 100 yuan medical service fee. She sends her mother's ID number and a screenshot of the verification code. He guarantees a slot by Friday. The official price of a standard outpatient ticket at most Beijing tertiary hospitals is 14 yuan. Peking Union sees around 12,000 outpatients a day, with peaks above 17,300. Roughly 60 percent of its patients are not from Beijing. A 2014 National Health Commission study found tertiary hospitals in Beijing saw 30.36 million out-of-town patient visits in 2013, with about 700,000 people in the city for medical care on any given day. The Chinese term for this trade is 医院黄牛, hospital yellow cows. Yellow cow is old slang for any scalper. Train tickets, concert seats, sneakers. The mechanism is identical. But in this market, the product is a doctor. And despite years of crackdowns, the price hasn't come down. - @samuelszuchan