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Private healthcare costs in Singapore
GeneralI recently went to a private specialist clinic for an urgent health matter to be treated and came away with some drug prescriptions that felt incredibly up charged from market price even for private healthcare standards. Of these, there was a charge for 14pc Augmentin (1g) at $10 per pill for a total of $140, and very normal supplements that can be purchased anywhere at more than two times market price.
While I was okay with consultation and procedure costs, having looked them up online, it was truly unexpected to get hit with medicine costs that ran up so much more than their normal costs anywhere else. I brought this up to the clinic and requested that I get a prescription so I could purchase the drugs at a better price outside, they looked quite dulan about the whole thing, and said that they didn’t do that for medicine they had in clinic. They also basically insisted that I get a lot of the other supplementary medicines even though they were just stuff to help me recover from the initial procedure. In the end they let me drop a bunch of the supplements and some painkillers, but largely insisted I keep most of them while insisting that I was “really going to suffer” and I might “end up at the A&E” (ended up only using like 10% of the extra stuff).
Having been to a couple of different private clinics, this is the first time I had encountered such a thing. But I have to ask, is this normal/common from other Singaporeans’ perspectives?
