The Galen Centre moots health budgeting as a multi-year project with costing instead of annual allocations, besides including health spending in the higher education and defence ministries.
Muda proposes a new payroll-funded social health insurance scheme to increase health care spending, similar to EPF and Socso contributions, based on a flexible scale according to income and age.
PN’s Radzi Jidin and PH’s Wong Chen say boosting public health care spending to 5% of the GDP can be funded by tackling corruption; BN’s Tengku Adnan simply says: “We know how to get the budget”.
Dr Lim Soo Kun from University of Malaya Specialist Centre says public hospitals should get bigger budgets if their programmes are able to curb chronic conditions.
Nephrologist Dr Lim Soo Kun says national health insurance will reduce catastrophic expenditure faced by cancer and organ failure patients paying out of pocket. Health analyst Chua Hong Teck suggests restoring GST and earmarking it for health spending.
Singapore and Indonesia are allowing foreign health care labour. Unless global and structural trends are reversed, Malaysia must start planning for the liberalisation of our health care labour market.
“If political parties don’t have at least 3 of the 4 listed, that means they’re not serious about ongoing & future challenges impacting the state of Malaysians’ health."