Monday, May 25, 2015

Medishield Life - household information

I overlook the hard copy mail that was sent to me regarding Medishield Life transitional subsidies. Fortunately, I got this timely reminder from Richard Giam's Facebook:

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Please remember to log in to www.medishieldlife.sg with your singpass. To declare your household members in order to receive the 4 years transitional subsidies given by the government due to the implementation of medishield life.
Only 1 member each household need to do this. So any member of the family can do it.
Please do this by 6th of June 2015.
Ministry of health data collection to decide on the subsidy for the coming medishield life exercise. Fill up and replyTake only less than 5 mins to confirm your household members details.
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I am sure that there will be a few hundred thousand people who would have overlooked this step, like me. Why was it necessary to carry out this registration? I guess that the government wanted to give a lower subsidy to those who stayed in private houses.
As the government intends to label people according to the type of house that they stay in to give different levels of subsidy, it is better than they assign a code that will last a lifetime. They can use this code to determine the amount of GST offset and other subsidies. It is wasteful to carry out a separate "registration exercise" every time.

A better way is for the government to impose higher property taxes (if this is really necessary) for people who live in private houses. (Actually, this is already happening). After imposing this higher tax, they should give the same level of subsidy to people without worrying about the type of housing that they stay in. They can still differentiate by age group. 
It is wasteful to carry out this type of unproductive work, which must have cost the country several tens of million dollars each time. This waste should be avoided.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

THeir idea is to benefit msians.
Most msians bought HDB at the low and need not contribute CPF unless they want to. Each time they change jobs, if they contribute CPF, their rate go back to the lowest first year rate.
Now they brought their parents along to enjoy free medical because it is free in msia.

Gov also brought lots of msian doctors to help leach on the CPF.
... all salaries were raised ...
Talking about cost control?

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