The slippery slope of corporatised healthcare
posted in - Nation, - Palmdoc |Choo Sing Chye in Malaysiakini eloquently sums up the problems when the Government decides to privatise or corporatise healthcare in Malaysia.
The haste to corporatise stands as a hallmark of the government to renegade from the responsibility to provide universal health care for the people. The crux of the question is not whether corporatisation in its initial form has sufficient safeguards, but will these safeguards be sustained indefinitely without falling prey to the ‘slippery slope’ principle which would begin to operate when cost escalates.
According to this principle, the involvement of the government in the corporatised healthcare system would surely and slowly shrink and in the end slip into a state where the government is totally divorced from it. Inevitably, corporatised healthcare would transformed into privatised entities. This had shamefully almost happened to the Institut Jantung Negara (IJN).
The problem is that previous corporatisation exercises have only resulted in increased costs in the related sectors. Dr Hsu also echos the sentiment that Healthcare should not be privatised
For example, in 1993, the procurement of medicine for government hospitals and clinic (medical store) was privatized and the cost of medicine doubled the following year. In 1996, following the privatization of five more areas including laundry, cleaning, equipment maintenance, waste disposal and facilities maintenance, the costs for these services skyrocketed from Rm140million to RM450 million the following year
I think the existence of private healthcare in Malaysia does alleviate to some extent the burden on public hospitals. However, in the absence of a functioning National Health Insurance scheme, the majority of the poor and uninsured will still rely on public hospitals. Until there is such a scheme, then public health institutions should never be privatised.
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