Thursday, March 17, 2016

Taiwan preferred not to follow Singapore's health care model

Singapore introduced Medisave, Medishield and Medifund during the 1980s. The government was extremely proud of our "3M" model and wanted to showcase it to the world.

Taiwan wanted to introduce a national health care system a few years later. They sent a study team to study the health care systems around the world. They also visited Singapore to study our "3M" system.

They introduced their national health care system based on the "single payer" government-funded model. They decided that the "3M" system was not good.

To my knowledge, no other country followed this model. It is complicated and confusing and wasteful. The health care providers, i.e. hospitals and specialists, had a great time to make a lot of profit from the system. Just look at the share prices of the listed medical groups.

Who pays? The people. Many people considered health care to be expensive and unaffordable. There is a saying in Singapore, "it is better to die than to be sick".

Each time I visit the public hospital, I get a bill to remind me about the wastefulness. The financial items, such as government subsidy through the various complicated schemes outnumbered the medical items.

The PAP government really loved to make a political issue out of every health care bill. They don't care about the waste that they are creating.

I prefer to see a total revamp of our health care system. We should get rid of the 3M model and follow Taiwan in introducing a national health care scheme.





2 comments:

Anonymous said...


The govt is indeed very very wasteful!

We are turning govt hospitals into hotelpitals, hotel-style hospitals!

Sad.


Yujuan said...

Dun like the Medishield Life, not transparent and too complicated with the various private shield plans, each charging different premiums at the discretion of those greedy private insurers. These Companies are given too much power to dictate premiums chargeable.

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