National Health Insurance The Way To Go Says Think Tank

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The financing of healthcare through taxes collected by the government will not be sustainable in the long run. says a think tank.PETALING JAYA: A think tank has urged the government to consider a national health insurance scheme that requires compulsory subscription by income earners
Speaking to FMT, Galen Centre for Health and Social Policy CEO Azrul Khalib said he feared that the financing of healthcare through taxes collected by the government would not be sustainable in the long run
He suggested a national insurance fund to which workers make compulsory monthly contributions, like they do to the Employees Provident Fund and the Social Security Organisation
The rate for each contributor should depend on his income and age, he said. “There would thus be a collective pooling of both funds and risks.”He said tax-based healthcare financing would work well only if the tax rate was high and a large proportion of the population paid taxes. He pointed out that Malaysian tax payers constituted less than 30% of the population
Azrul noted that this year’s government budget of RM29 billion for healthcare was the biggest allocation ever, but he said even that amount might not be sufficient considering the increasing cost of treating chronic and non-communicable diseases
He said hospitals might not have the means to avail themselves of the latest advances in the medical field if the government stuck to tax-based financing
The standard of healthcare would then be poorer than expected for an upper-middle-income country “and people would have to travel overseas to get quality treatment,” he added
Azrul was a participant at a healthcare conference earlier. - FMT

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