KTPH sends debt collector to go after patients

[makapaaa]

[h=2]KTPH sends debt collector to go after patients[/h]

June 29th, 2014 |

Author: Editorial




A reader has forwarded his friend’s letter to TRE, just to show how heartless
our “privatized” hospitals have become.

Alexandra Health Pte Ltd, which operates Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, has engaged
debt collector Accolade Advisory Asia Pte Ltd to collect an outstanding balance
of $621.20 from the reader’s friend.

According to its website [Link], Accolade Advisory Asia
provides “total receivables management solutions to the risk manager”.

It said, “Companies and financial institutions have turned to us for debt
management, debt recovery as well as the specialised/customised research
capabilities required for effective receivables management.”

It also said that it has established “reliable and experienced associates
around the world” to help recover overseas debts. Hence, if someone was to skip
town, the company can engage their overseas associates to trace and find
him.

The letter ended by saying:

“If we do not receive your payment within (7) days from the date of this
letter, action will be taken to recover the debt without further reference to
you.”
​

Privatization of our public hospitals

To help make our hospitals more “efficient”, the government has embarked on a
“privatization” programme. The government set up a private company called, “MOH
Holdings Pte Ltd” (MOHH) to oversee all the public health institutions in
Singapore. MOHH is legally owned by [Link]:

• Chua Geok Wah – 1 share
• Minister for Finance – 672,866,308 shares

(Chua Geok Wah is the Accountant-General of Singapore)

According to its website information [Link], MOHH is the holding
company of Singapore’s public healthcare assets. MOHH currently undertakes
strategic initiatives for the Ministry of Health and the public healthcare
institutions. These include:

• Common employment of junior doctors to ensure effective allocation and
  training of our medical manpower;
• Developing a national IT framework for Singapore’s public healthcare sector;
• Providing a system for joint recruitment of healthcare professionals for
  Singapore’s public healthcare institutions;
• Developing and operationalising a talent management and HR framework for the
  entire public healthcare spectrum;
• Optimising selected finance-related functions within the MOHH Group, such as
  central treasury;
• Providing corporate advisory and support to MOHH’s subsidiaries, and
  creating a corporate development system to support future organisational
  developments in the MOHH Group; and,
• Providing strategic and operational Board secretarial support for MOHH’s
  Group of entities.

Our public hospitals within MOHH are divided into six broad clusters. They
include:

1. National University Health System (NUHS)
2. National Healthcare Group (NHG)
3. Singapore Health Services (SHS)
4. Alexandra Health System (AHPL)
5. Jurong Health Services (JHS)
6. Eastern Health Alliance (EHA)

Liak Teng Lit is the CEO of Alexandra Health

Liak Teng Lit


Alexandra Health was established on 1 April 2008, as a healthcare cluster in
the north that currently manages the Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. As part of an
integrated healthcare system to serve the community in the region, Alexandra
Health will build and oversee the Yishun Community Hospital, Admiralty Medical
Centre and an Integrated Healthcare Development @ Woodlands. This integrated
healthcare network will be operational from end December 2015 to 2022.

The Group Chief Executive Officer of Alexandra Health System is Mr Liak Teng
Lit. He is also the Deputy Chairman of NEA. Last month, he scolded Singaporeans
for their “poor upbringing” in response to some patrons who did not want to
return trays at hawker centres (‘NEA Dty Chairman scolds S’poreans for poor upbringing‘),

Mr Liak then said, “If you all eat properly and not eat until a mess, how
will you dirty your hands (for returning trays)? It’s problem of
upbringing. Everyone should depend on oneself (to return trays). Don’t
depend on others. Everyone should really reflect on this.”

Last year, in an interview with the Straits Times (ST) [Link],
he also said of Singaporeans, “In hawker centres we eat like
pigs, with food and tissue all over the tables. It’s a
disgrace. We don’t eat like that at home.”

Mr Liak also frowns on subsidising healthcare. In an interview with ST on 20
July 2012 (‘Why the dung beetle is his hero ‘), it was reported:

He (Liak) frowns upon how subsidies have inflated the demand for health care
and led to shortages: ‘The truth is when we go for a buffet, almost all of us
eat a little bit more than we normally do. If you subsidise something, at the
margin, there will always be more demand.’

Subsidised wards are so cheap, some children may prefer their elderly parents
to stay a day or two longer. But if every patient delays discharge by just half
a day, Singapore will need to build another Singapore General Hospital that
costs $2 billion, and about half a billion a year in subsidies, to run. The
demand for subsidies is a ‘bottomless pit’, he warns. ‘If you’re going to
subsidise my petrol, I won’t drive the Toyota Prius, I will drive the Lexus
460.

‘Follow the British National Health Service? That may mean that the
Government has to increase the goods and services tax to, say, 20 per cent to
cover the cost of these additional beds,’ he says, adding that Singapore’s 3M
framework – Medisave, MediShield and Medifund – is sound.

As diseases are increasingly diagnosed at the molecular level with more
expensive drugs, costs will shoot through the roof. His fear for Singaporeans
today is that they clamour for their rights but disown their responsibilities.
‘In cyberspace, there are howling monkeys who scream, shout and
demoralise others.

‘My worry is that everybody is screaming about his rights as a citizen to get
subsidies, but he doesn’t feel he has a responsibility to contribute or pay his
taxes. They have the right to treatment but don’t have a responsibility to take
care of their health,’ he says.
​

In that interview, he also told the ST reporter that his hero is the dung
beetle:

He (Liak) says straight-faced that his hero is the dung beetle, which feeds
on faeces. ‘They walk the ground, burrow underground, clean up the environment,
recycle nutrients and improve soil aeration. Most of all, they solve problems
others leave behind.’
​

The reader who wrote to TRE said, “I am very disappointed that KTPH SEND such
a letter to my friend to chase for the outstanding payments.”

It’s not known how and why our public health system has transformed itself
into such commercialized one, even engaging debt collectors with international
linkages and issuing letters of demand to its citizen patients.

During the National Day Rally last year, PM Lee promised:

“Besides housing, we will also give Singaporeans more assurance over life’s
uncertainties, especially healthcare. Working adults feel the pressure taking
care of growing children, also looking after elderly parents. People with
chronic illnesses worry, worry about the cost of consultations, the cost of
medicines, maybe a few cents a day but day after day, year after year. When you
have high blood pressure, the doctor prescribes something to you. He says,
please take this, please take this for the rest of your life and you have to
take it seriously. Older people worry about the medical bills which they may
face and worry about the burden which they may place on their children.
So we will improve healthcare financing to give Singaporeans more peace
of mind.”
​

Later, the MediShield Life Review Committee (MLRC) was formed to review
Singapore’s healthcare financing and on Friday (27 Jun), the Government
announced that it has accepted all the recommendations by the Committee with
regard to the new MediShield Life scheme (‘Medishield Life: ‘Premiums will need to increase’‘).

MediShield Life will roll out in end-2015 next year. It remains to be seen if
after the implementation of MediShield Life, Singaporeans will still be chased
by debt collectors sent-in by our public hospitals, since PM Lee promised that
the new improved healthcare financing will give Singaporeans “more peace of
mind”.

What do you think?

 

[makapaaa]

And in the meantime, see how generous the FAP Traitors are to foreigners:

January 22, 2014 [h=1]Singapore Government Spends $400 Million To Invite International Students To Study In Singapore?[/h]On Monday, Education Minister Heng Swee Keat had revealed that the Ministry of Education (MOE) has given international students tuition grants of a total of about $210 million per year. He also revealed that 1,700 international students and 2,200 university students had received tuition grants.
When you look back at what MOE had revealed in 2011, you will be able to get a clearer picture. MOE had said that, “<a href="http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/parliamentary-replies/2011/11/number-of-international-students-prs.php" sl-processed="1">almost all <abbr title="Permanent Residents">PR</abbr>s and <abbr title="International Student">IS</abbr> (international students) are in receipt of MOE’s Tuition Grant (<abbr title="Tuition Grant">TG</abbr>) scheme“.
So, wait a minute, Heng had said that 6% (of each matriculation cohort) or 1,700 in the polytechnics and 13% or 2,200 the publicly-funded universities had received tuition grants. And if “almost all … international students are in receipt of MOE’s Tuition Grant scheme”, then what does this really mean?
If it might be unclear at first, it is because of the way the reply was phrased. On first reading, you might think that only 6% of international students in the polytechnics and 13% of the international students in the universities receive tuition grants, right? Actually, no. The 6% and 13% actually refers to the proportion of the total student population, including Singaporeans.
Then how many international students are there exactly? For the purpose of this article, we will zoom in to look at the university cohort.
18% University Students Are International Students, 13% On Tuition Grants, 5% On Scholarships?
MOE had revealed that, “<a href="http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/parliamentary-replies/2011/11/number-of-international-students-prs.php" sl-processed="1">for the past ten years, … the number of International Student (<abbr title="International Student">IS</abbr>) (is) at 20% of the total intake… For example, in AY2011, <abbr title="International Student">IS</abbr> comprised 18% while <abbr title="Permanent Residents">PR</abbr>s were 4% of undergraduate intake.” So, if there were 18% international students, and only 13% had received tuition grants, what happened to the other 5%?
But what are tuition grants exactly? According to MOE, “the Tuition Grant Scheme was introduced by the Government in 1980 to subsidise the cost of tertiary education in Singapore. The Tuition Grant Scheme is open to students enrolled in full-time diploma or undergraduate courses (subject to guidelines under existing policy).” It also added that, “You will be eligible for Tuition Grant for your new course at approved Institutions of Higher Learning (IHLs) as long as you have not already attained a diploma or degree or higher qualifications through MOE subsidies or sponsorship by the Singapore Government.“
So, that means that for the 5% international students who had not received tuition grants, were they already on scholarships? And for the 13% who had received the tuition grants, do they receive additional scholarships thereafter?
In fact, Heng shared that, the international students in the polytechnics who received tuition grants went down from 9% in 2010 to 6%, whereas in the universities, it went down from 18% to 13%. Does this mean that the proportion of students who had received scholarships had went up instead?
52% Of International Students On Scholarships
Last November, I had written about how Singaporeans pay the second highest university tuition fees among the high-income countries and how Singaporeans also receive the lowest scholarships.
In it, I had also shared that MOE had revealed that, “on average, about 14% of our undergraduates and 30% of our postgraduates in NUS and NTU in 2001-2005 were on scholarships. About one-third of the undergraduate scholars were local students.“
I calculated that when you breakdown the proportion, you would realise that actually, there were 52% of the international students who were on scholarships, and only 6% of Singaporeans who were on scholarships!

Thus if 52% of the international students were on scholarships, it would mean that of those who had tuition grants, there would be a substantial proportion of them who were on scholarships as well – what this means is that for a sizeable proportion of international students, they were being sponsored to study in Singapore for FREE.
Meanwhile, how many Singaporeans could actually study for free?
Government Gives International Tuition Grants Of $210 Million, Gives Scholarships Of $185 Million?
So, we were told that international students had received tuition grants of $210 million every year. But what if we were to include the scholarships?
Based on a rough estimation, for the 5% who did not receive tuition grants but who could have received scholarships, about $120 million should have been spent on them. Of those who had received tuition grants and who would also have received scholarships, about $65 million should have been spent on them.
In total, there could have been $400 million spent by the government to bring in international students to study in Singapore.

So, the $210 million revealed on Monday doesn’t show the full picture. $210 million represents only the grants given out as tuition grants. But when you add in what was given in scholarship, this amount might be substantially higher. What’s more, we haven’t even added in bursaries.
Now, let’s put the possible $400 million into a bit of perspective. If you just look at how much Singaporeans would have to pay for university tuition fees, this $400 million might actually enable all Singaporeans who are currently studying in the local public universities to study for FREE!
Are you shocked yet?
Singaporeans Pay Second Highest University Tuition Fees, Receive Lowest Scholarships
Why does the government keep claiming that they are providing so much subsidies for Singaporeans? When you look at the subsidy that the government gives to Singaporeans for non-lab courses, this is only $19,100. Singaporeans still have to pay $7,650 out of our own pockets, or about 40% of the subsidy. On the surface, 40% is a discount. But when you compare what Singaporeans pay with what the citizens in other high-income countries pay, Singaporeans actually pay the second-highest university tuition fees, after Ireland!
So, when you look at it in perspective – from how much Singaporeans actually have to pay out from our pockets, it is not cheap. In fact, for Singaporeans, we have to pay one of the highest university tuition fees in the world.
Meanwhile, why is it that for the international students who come, there is a substantial proportion who would be able to study for free, but not for Singaporeans? And why is it that for whatever the government is paying for the international students to invite them to study in Singapore, the government might actually be able to let all Singaporean university students study for free?
Something is very wrong when your government has enough money to let its citizens study for free, but they choose to give that money to other people, other than its own citizens, right?
Singapore Government Spends Least On Education, Priority On International Students Over Singaporeans?
Not only that, I had also written about how the Singapore government spends the lowest on education as a proportion of GDP, as compared to all the other high-income countries. If the Singapore government is already so stingy with how much they spend on education, why would they prioritise what they spend on international students? Why are they not prioritising their spending on Singaporeans? And if they want to prioritise their spending on international students, shouldn’t they then increase their expenditure on education to ensure that Singaporeans also receive at least the same benefits?
Hello! We are the people who vote you into power! We are the people who have a long-term stake in this country, and who would be here to work with you to make Singapore a success story! Hello, we are the Singaporeans! Why has this government forgotten all that the Singaporeans have given them, and decide to neglect the Singaporeans and spend their time buying international students over?
Hello! Which government in the world does that? Which government treats its people as second-class citizens while giving international students who might not have a stake in this country first class treatment? Hello??
Singaporeans, if you haven’t realised, we might have just done ourselves in.

*****​

In the aftermath of the transport fare increase, and in the face of the pending increase of the MediShield premium and Medisave contribution rate, do you have something to say about how the government apportion budget for Singapore?
Do you think the $1,000 wage that the government wants to legislate for cleaners is enough? Do you think more workers should earn a minimum wage and do you think the minimum wage should be higher?
Come join us at the Pre-Budget 2014 Forum, where we would be discussing these issues and sharing with you our recommendations and proposals. This event is jointly supported by MARUAH, Function 8 and Workfair.
You can find out more about the event at the Facebook event page here.

 

[songsongjurong]

If mugabe refuse to make payment, will Accolade be up for the job?


Its really sad state of health ministry is governing its affairs.. no money, they bankrupt you!

Expect more misery during down turn....

 

[Hans168]

no wonder so many doctors driving sports cars

 

[Leongsam]

Owe $ Pay $.

It's a small bill and he should pay it. If he doesn't pay it, some other taxpayer will have to pay it on his behalf.

 

[KNNBGCB]

No need to pay one lah. Just take the letter and go see MP and use the media

 

[hockbeng]

Owe $ Pay $.

It's a small bill and he should pay it. If he doesn't pay it, some other taxpayer will have to pay it on his behalf.

agree with you.

all debts should be paid.

if one can default on hospital bills; it will start the ball rolling and in the end; nobody will pay for anything including taxes.

 

[Narong Wongwan]

agree with you.

all debts should be paid.

if one can default on hospital bills; it will start the ball rolling and in the end; nobody will pay for anything including taxes.

These debt collecting companies are owned by cronies.
Business with ready instant customers.....
Not only hospital bills but other outstanding bills like hdb loan installments....town council charges.
Things like tax, traffic fines etc no need debt collectors as under police as its crinminal charge.

 

[johnny333]

Who did he vote for


Many are finding out the true cost of trusting the PAP. It's going to cost them their CPF, their jobs & their families jobs, their country, ...etc, etc.

 

[da dick]

all debts should be paid. return CPF and medisave!

 

[halsey02]

Owe $ Pay $.

It's a small bill and he should pay it. If he doesn't pay it, some other taxpayer will have to pay it on his behalf.

That person better pay the bill or when check in the next time to KTPH or any ...the person will be wheeled straight to the mortuary to await instructions...!!