Special blog feature:
By Yawning Bread
Leong Sze Hian devours numbers like almost no one I know. Recently, he noticed something about healthcare costs and subsidies that begged a lot of questions, and on at least 3 occasions, he tried to interest me in them.
I finally paid attention on his third attempt, by which time he had written a piece for The Online Citizen about his many observations. I’m not going to dwell on most of them, but only the bit about Medifund, which serves as the take-off point for this essay.
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What piqued Leong’s interest were the discrepancies in various numbers reported in the Straits Times.
On 4 December 2007, the headline of a story said “Record 301,000 needy patients get help from Medifund”. It reported that a total of “307,500 Singaporeans applied to Medifund” in 2006, of which only 6,500 or 2.1% were turned down.
It also reported that Medifund gave out a total of S$39.6 million in 2006.
Leong’s quick calculation revealed that on average each beneficiary received only S$132. His point was that this was not only remarkably stingy on a per capita basis, but looks even worse compared to 2001 pay-out of S$174 per head. (I don’t know what his source was for the 2001 figure.) This, especially as healthcare costs have been climbing more rapidly than inflation.
Read the full article on Yawning Bread.
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Dear People,
Here is a wonderful article which will not see the light of day had it been sent to the MSM. This is where the Internet comes in. Remember – the Internet is the Great Equalizer. In the free market of ideas – lets see whether the MSM can provide a credible analysis. Indeed the success of the Internet is precisely because the MSM has FAILED to provide credible, unbiased and objective analyses.
Let the best ideas triumph in the free market of ideas !
State funding for healthcare here is miserable for a country that in 2005 had the highest reserves on a per capita basis (see http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_tot_res_min_gol_cur_us_percap-gold-current-us-per-capita)
We are fast becoming a country only fit for the rich and healthy and if one is old, JB is waiting for us. We have a an aging population and with old age health issues rises. This is a time to expand the scope of health care especially those related to old age and not reduce the health budget. The PAP regime’s policies clearly is not aimed at Sinkaporean well being but for its own political purposes which is not beneficial to us citizen. We serve our NS in the prime of our life and when we grow old we may be shipped to JB to live out the rest of our life. Is this what we all live and defend for ? There may be good economic reasons for using JB as an old people home but country has a responsibility to care and look after its citizen. To measure everything in life in dollar and cent is really going too far. Is the PAP regime a financial political party? We are the only country in the world to pay minister millions of dollar a year for a job that minister in the western world receive a tiny fraction of what Sinkaporean minister received. There is something seriously wrong in our political system.