Husband defrauds hospital for medical fees to save wife

A man is being accused of conning a Beijing Hospital out of thousands of yuan in medical fees to save his gravely-ill wife. His wife can’t join the social insurance system in Beijing because she is not the resident of Beijing and doesn’t have a job here. Although the husband should be punished for what he did, many netizens are touched by the moving love story between he and his wife.
Austerity or prosperity? For Mr. Liao, neither matters more than his wife’s life.
Desperation is the only feeling Mr. Liao has experienced over the past few years.
His wife, Mrs. Du was diagnosed with uremia in 2007.
She can’t enjoy the social insurance benifits in Bejing, and the family was too poor to afford the medical fees which come to more than 5-thousand yuan a month.
Both Mr. Liao and his wife are retired. To earn more money, Mr. Liao had to drive an unregistered motorcycle taxi, but the money he get was far from enough.
To save his wife’s life, Mr. Liao made fake receipts for blood dialysis treatments from 2007 to 2011.
According to court authorities, the total cost of the treatments was about 172,000 yuan.
Liao’s case was soon picked up by Chinese media.
Since the start of the trial, more than 1.58 million netizens on Sina Weibo, a popular micro-blogging website, have discussed the topic.
Some support him, saying he had no other choice and he couldn’t watch his wife die. They say the court should reduce Liao’s sentence and people should give him support and donations.
However, others say no matter how moving Liao’s story is, he should take responsibility for the crime he is accused of if he is convicted.
So far, he has paid his debt to the hospital using money he got from donations.
The Criminal Law states that someone convicted of fraud will face a sentence of three to 10 years in prison.   (CCTV)