This isn’t new so it isn’t news. But I have wanted to say this for a long time: The excuses given is a stinking load of droppings from a bull’s behind.
Let me try and explain with this analogy:
The reason they need to start denying people who can afford it from eating at hawker centres is: to upgrade your neighbourhood hawker centre to restaurant standards. People who can afford to eat at restaurants should be prevented from taking advantage of the subsidised food at the ‘restaurant standard’ hawker centres.
What the hell? The fact is, the people who eat at restaurants also contributed part of the money – and perhaps more than the others on an individual vs individual bases – into upgrading the hawker centre. So why does it even matter whether the standards can improve to that level? That’s not forgetting whether these people will like eating hawker centre food at all, no matter the standards?
Above which, what good is a super nice hawker centre with restaurant standards in which few people even qualify to eat in it at hawker centre prices? Not to mention that after contributing to making it restaurant standards, you have to pay some ridiculous price when you have to eat in it? Might as well go straight to the restaurant if you can afford it! On top of that, why the hell upgrade the standards in the first place? Might as well leave it at the current standards where everyone can enjoy the subsidised food!
So, let’s consider this. The people who can afford going to Mt Alvernia or Mt Elizabeth technically aren’t interested in going to restructured hospitals anyway. How often are these people ‘abusing’ the heavily subsidised and improved Class B2 and C wards in the first place? I must ask, are there even figures to substantiate that there is an increase in the rich using the subsidised wards now to cause us to be concern about their ‘abuse’ of them later when they are improved? Besides, whether the rich uses those wards is not the main issue… the rich also pays more taxes so what logic is this to deny them subsidised wards should they even find it agreeable to use them in the first place? * ptui *
Furthermore, common sense will also tell you that should they managed to improve the ‘lesser wards’ to Class A standards, it will definitely come with a Class A price tag too. Or at least then they can justify that kind of price tag. But will they really cost so much or like our HDB prices, a figure is just pulled out of thin air and we are then asked to pay for it?
Now, the people who are going to stay at the ‘subsidised’ wards are people like you and I, who in most cases would prefer to keep it as cheap as possible because our money don’t come easy. And now here’s this stupid means testing that tells you – Oh, by our standards you made enough money, so stop being a burden to the state and go fend for yourselves. And suddenly, you discover you might as well have gone straight to the better wards right along.
Next, this gover-min always tells us that we don’t really have much poor people in this country. We also haven’t got people on the streets and we have a really small percentage of people below the poverty line. So who would really qualify for subsidies in the end, and are the subsidies even real or just ‘market subsidies’ because no one had a clue how the price came about?
Frankly, I am not surprised that in the end, even our hospital subsidies will go along the line of our HDB ones. That is, there will be an ‘astronomical, real and tangible’ subsidy in the books of the gover-min but we just wonder why the hell we are our asses off for our own medical bills, or that why we are paying a ridiculous sum of premium for our own health insurance.
Just pray hard no one rubs salt on the wound by telling you our restructured hospitals aren’t making money, and a ‘Health and Medical Council’ (HMC) is formed to rubber-stamp their annual demands for fee increments!
“MOH”> Well, then they can just tell us the truth. They wanna increase cost and cost-cut on subsidies. It doesn’t annoy me as much if they tell us something we can’t do anything about. It annoys me a lot more when they even try to fool us over something we can’t do anything about.
The reality is the gover-min is going to increase health care costs. So more subsidies or less the percentages lose its meaning when absolute numbers are just going to go up.
Many people may not know this and neither it is reported in the news, but polyclinic fees have gone up in Dec 2007 around Xmas time. It is a sly carefully planned move designed to shield public attention from it.