In this PressTV.com article and video, 1Care is being highlighted as a scheme whereby Malaysia is shifting health care responsibility to private sector
The 1Care scheme is expected to replace the current two-tier health care system with one that integrates both private and government hospitals in the hope of ensuring more equitable health care for all Malaysians. Under the present system, Malaysians could opt to seek treatment in the government hospitals for a nominal fee or get treated in private clinics and hospitals.
The crux of the issue is not the alleged “10%” additional healthcare tax. The bigger issue is no matter what the quantum of healthcare tax, there will now be one huge single healthcare system and in one stroke, the public healthcare system will also be “privatised”. This will be essentially very similar to the NHS in the UK. So is this a good thing? Those who are working in the UK will tell you otherwise. Their system is broken and there are many many problems with the NHS. Take this example from a doctor currently working in the UK:
The NHS practically monopolises the UK healthcare, when there is no money, the NHS managers cut corners and clinicans are powerless to stop them. UK probably have the most nurse led services in the world. If you refer a patient to the NHS upper GI department for dysphagia, chances are he will not be seen in the clinic, but get seen directly in the endoscopy suite by a nurse. The nurse takes history by ticking boxes in a pre-arranged form, shaft the scope down his throat, and if there is nothing found, discharged. Doesn’t matter if he still can’t eat and has lost a lot weight. Doesn’t matter there is no diagnosis yet.
1care will run out of money very quickly, mark my words if it becomes a reality. Then the people in charge of the money will pressure you guys to do the same as the NHS now. Right now, I feel like I am working in a under funded factory with the managers desperately seeking ways to cut costs.
You would have thought that everybody get access to healthcare under the NHS. The truth is thre is constant rationing of use of the health resources. For eg ITU service: people are being denied ITU because it is better to give it to someone else who have a better prognosis. This happens everyday throughout UK.
The worst thing with every GP getting about 14k a month of income is that this is communist, there is no incentive to treat patients anymore. In NHS, GPs refer cases to the hospitals for the most trivial of symptoms. It is one way of getting rid of the patients. A GP once wrote to us saying that they have no time nor funding allocated to clear people’s ear wax, so a handful of ENT consultants should pick up the service of cleaning ear wax for a population of 600,000+!
Many think it is important to maintain a 2-tier system. There will be a check and balance with more choice as opposed to a single payer monopoly system. Competition is always good, and monopolies are almost always a bad thing. 70% of the population use public healthcare facilities and this is where the money should go to (to improve public healthcare facilities, keeping good staff etc.), not further privatise healthcare. The Government instead of increasing public healthcare spending has kept this stagnant at under 3% of the GDP for the last 8 years. In fact if you look at the budget, healthcare expenditure is only a tiny fraction, being less than spending on arms, and far far less than the whopping Prime Minister’s Department.
One wonders why the latter needs so much? Just proportion more the Healthcare!! The Government cannot claim it has no money when it is clearly a case of misallocation of funds. Now do you say 1Care or TakNak1Care?
from the Malaysian Medical Resources
1Care: shifting health care responsibility to the private sector
