KUALA LUMPUR, August 21 — Rakan KKM will offer total knee replacement surgery, among other elective procedures, Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad announced today.
During his winding-up speech on the debate on the 13th Malaysia Plan (13MP) in Parliament, Dzulkefly said Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim had asked him when he could show the first patient of Rakan KKM.
The health minister described Rakan KKM as a coalition of partners: specialist doctors, the Ministry of Health (MOH), investors from government-linked investment companies (GLICs), and patients.
“It’s personalised specialised care that is not related to essential services in a public hospital, whether emergency or primary health care for non-communicable diseases (NCDs). These are elective procedures,” Dzulkefly told the Dewan Rakyat.
“If you do total knee replacement, we wait six months in the public services, but if not, we go to private. Instead of us going to private, now there’s a choice to come to Rakan KKM.”
In the same breath, Dzulkefly acknowledged a mismatch in specialist distribution and patient workloads between the public and private sectors, telling Parliament that only 30 per cent of specialists are working in the public sector but they manage 70 per cent of the country’s patient load.
“From the perspective of patient workloads, there’s a mismatch in specialties like oncology, paediatrics, anaesthesiology et cetera.”
The health minister reiterated that the government cannot increase public health care spending to 5 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) solely from general taxation, saying that an increase of another 1 per cent of GDP for public health care amounted to RM20 billion.
He pointed out that the MOH’s 2025 budget of RM45.3 billion was an increase of only about RM4 billion from 2024.
“Therefore, I’m faced with a situation and reality of how to diversify [financing] sources,” said Dzulkefly.
Besides Rakan KKM, the health minister touted a National Health Fund that would comprise revenue from pro-health taxes like tobacco, vape, alcohol, and sugar-sweetened beverages. But he did not specify the legal mechanism to ensure that revenue from these taxes would be earmarked for health, instead of going to the federal consolidated fund.
The Ministry of Finance (MOF) previously said in July 2024 that vape liquid tax revenue could not be earmarked for health because, according to the Federal Constitution, all revenues and funds acquired by the federation must go into the federal consolidated fund.
Rakan KKM, a private health care service operated by Rakan KKM Sdn Bhd, is expected to launch in four government hospitals – Cyberjaya Hospital, Putrajaya Hospital, Sultan Idris Shah Serdang Hospital, and the National Cancer Institute (IKN) – by the end of next month.
Dzulkefly’s statement in Parliament alluded to a much shorter wait in Rakan KKM for a major procedure like total knee replacement by comparing with a six-month wait in public hospitals, but stopped short of saying directly that paying patients would get immediate treatment like in private hospitals.
Lawmakers and the general public have expressed outrage over the prospect of inequality created by Rakan KKM that prioritises paying patients over public-sector patients, with some equating it to privatisation or a “two-tier” public health care system.
Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) recently launched a campaign to “save the public health care system”, including cancelling Rakan KKM.
Mark Cheong, deputy head of school (education) at Monash University Malaysia’s School of Pharmacy, told Astro Awani’s Consider This last month that if Rakan KKM scaled up massively, rather than providing only a narrow scope of elective services, then “our worst nightmare will come true – we will truly have privatisation of our health care system.”
In a similar vein, albeit the flip side of the coin, Galen Centre for Health and Social Policy chief executive Azrul Mohd Khalib told the Keluar Sekejap podcast aired last August 8 that he did not expect Rakan KKM to be able to disrupt anything as the service was likely to be modest.
Today was the first time that the health minister specified a procedure that would be offered by Rakan KKM. Dzulkefly did not offer Parliament further details, including the target launch date, hospitals that would offer these private wings, or a full list of services.
CodeBlue previously reported that Malaysia’s public health care sector is estimated to be short of nearly 11,000 specialist doctors this year. In orthopaedics, there is an estimated deficit of 476 orthopaedic specialists.
