Weighing the medical cost of living in China

The surreal moments of the past week had to do with my daughter being sick, and hoping that she didn't take a turn for the worst after 7 PM, 5 PM on weekends.
When she was about 18 months old, she swallowed some tissue paper, which blocked her windpipe for awhile. She gasped, she cried, her faced turned red. My wife called the emergency line at a local hospital that caters to expats and asked for advice. Bring her in, they replied with equal urgency. Please send an ambulance to-, and before she could get the address out, they reminded her that they don't do that. So she had to take a taxi. Thank God it wasn't raining, or in the early hours of the morning; she got a taxi and headed for the hospital. I happened to be on the other side of the river having dinner with two coworkers, and met her there. They kept the clinic open and were ready for us to arrive. On the other hand, they aren't outfitted for pediatrics, so didn't have proper equipment to pump a child's stomach. The plan was to send us to a Chinese hospital, with an English-speaking nurse to interpret.
As much as I've studied and picked up Chinese, my medical jargon vocab is nil.
Two other issues are raised by this plan--Chinese hospitals have been known to turn away foreigners because they don't want the headache that may accompany treating us. That is, if the patient takes a turn for the worse, they fear getting in trouble for damaging the local reputation with the lucrative expat community. Better to turn us away at the door. I haven't experienced this first hand, but this happened at 11 PM on a Friday night to our good friend and her two-year old daughter. The second issue is payment--up front and in cash. We didn't have our emergency stack of 10,000 RMB in hand, neither our ATM card (which has a 3000 RMB daily limit), which would mean a delay while we called coworkers and friends to bring to us the cash before my daughter could be treated.
So you can see it's a bit capricious.
Thankfully, the tissue paper that had blocked her windpipe had dissolved and her natural body reponse (i.e. throwing up) got rid of the rest.
That was almost two years ago. I'll get back to the last week, but now I have classes to teach.