Medical Cost Running Amok

With medical cost running amok over the last decade, govt grant / subsidy on Medical bill is not helping patients as long as medical cost keep going up even faster than national inflation rate. What is the point if higher govt grant only leads to higher medical cost ?  In end result is the patients cough out even more while the hospitals / clinics pocket more.

Let us not forget that these grants are coming from taxpayers.  Govt grant is between 50 to 70%, with pioneer generation getting slight more.  This is a lot of money since our medical cost is so high. They could have been put to better use helping lower income patients instead of going into hospitals/clinics wealth chest.

Then they force us to save more into our CPF Medisave account, increased our insurance premium for Medishield so that they can extend the coverage to try to catch up with the inflating medical fee. They then tell us that we have Medisave liability if we could not meet their ever increasing minimum sum for Medisave, which currently there seems to have no limit set as it keep going up and up yearly.

This CPF liability thing is ridiculous as how can we own ourselves money?  So what they are in fact telling us is that we owned CPF money which is nonsensical.  The whole CPF system has become senseless when they want to retain our money in CPF and introduced all sorts of policies to have total control over our CPF savings.  Money that could have gone into our retirement needs are sucked into Medisave to cover for our Medishield premium and sky high medical cost.

Some factors that are driving up medical cost which will keep going up if left uncheck are :

- the so call 'public' hospitals/clinics where govt grant is applicable are all privatized so they are all profit oriented

- govt making S'pore into a medical hub in S.E. Asia only increase demand for health services. Increase demand drives up fee.

- availability of money from patient's Medisave, Medishield and govt grant could encourage hefty billing as out right cash payment is reduced and the fee looks 'affordable' on paper.