Singapore Health Care

I was following the world news, and I applaud the Obama administration health care proposal that was passed by the House.

Singapore was even suggested as a model with good results and greater than average free market elements, but then again we’ve our government intervention with price controls and compulsory savings, which is pretty difficult to replicate in most countries.

President Barack Obama Sunday said House passage of health care overhaul was a ‘courageous vote’ for many lawmakers.

I’m truly an advocate of healthy living, and there’s nothing more important to me than living a sustainable quality of life by your own means, and a strong health care reform in your own country to support your personal healthy living cause.

We all know these days with more people becoming more obese and just refusing to change their slouch sedentary lifestyle of convenience … that it’s no surprise that overall health care cost expenditures in terms of sustainability of expenditures, has surpassed even those of inflation and economic growth.

It’s alarming to know that many people can’t afford even the basic of health care even in developed countries, and there are even those who are bankrupt by their own medical costs.

That’s why personally I’m trying my best to stay fit, and healthy as best as I could.

I guess the underlying notion behind that is that I hate to be a burden to other people, and the thought of depending on people’s “hand-outs” just appalls me.

I’m the type of person who just refuses to “owe” anyone anything.

Locally … albeit Singapore was ranked 6th in the World Health Organization’s ranking of the world’s health systems in the year 2000, and was said to have “one of the most successful healthcare systems in the world, in terms of both efficiency in financing and the results achieved in community health outcomes,”, there’s still room for improvement in our health care system.

My recommendations so far,

1. Prescription drugs could still be cheaper. It was revealed in Parliament recently that many people here in Singapore still goes to Malaysia to buy prescription drugs because they are much cheaper there.
2. There’s still many employers who don’t provide health-care insurance, and most often they’re not portable.
3. Allow more control over our Medisave. I’m still baffled over the process of withdrawing amounts from it, which can be time process consuming and subject to a complex set of rules which the Ministry of Health

Our health care secret I reckon is the nation paranoid three-prong 3M approach, which is Medisave (1984), Medishield (1990) and Medifund (1993).

We all know Singapore are able to implement any widespread changes by the government with no problems, as we’re actually a socialist country in secret, haha … Hidup PAP!