mollymeek (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mollymeek) wrote,@ 2007-06-03 02:42:00 |
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How to Inform, Educate and Reassure Singaporeans
In the footsteps of a certain Ms. Bhavani who became rather famous last year for her commandments regarding the role of journalists, Ms. Julie Sim from the Ministry of Health (Media Relations) has decided to tell the Straits Times (the premium pro-gahmen paper) what it should do after its health correspondent Salma Khalik wrote about the rising hospital fees and the implementation means testing. The authoritative MOH version of the bible for journalists goes:
Allow Pastor Molly Meek to extrapolate a code of behavior for Straits Times journalists from these two verses:
1. The Straits Times has a role to “help.” Molly assumes this means that paper has to “help” government ministries. (Don’t ask me why.)
2. “Educating” the public is not a matter of raising questions regarding the establishment or certain phenomena associated with the current status quo. It is presumably a matter of regurgitating what the representatives of government ministries have to say.
3. Similarly, the public is not “informed” by articles that offer alternatives to perspectives that are contrary to the government’s. Informing the public is also a matter of telling the public what government ministries have to say or want it to believe.
4. The Straits Times has a role to “reassure” the public. It cannot report any worrying trends in society, but should lull the people into a state ofcomplacency contentedness.
Having such high standards for journalists, one can be assured that Ms. Sim’s letter to the Straits Times will certainly educate, inform and reassure Singaporeans - perhaps with the exception of some treacherous bimbos who refuse to be educated. Yes, it’s really educational and informative. Except that Molly read the whole article without understanding how health care "remains affordable" to her. She was wondering: if health care was not affordable in the past to begin with, how could it possibly remain affordable? And interestingly, Ms. Sim doesn't seem to have anything to say about how people are coping with hospital bills. Instead, she has an industrious list of what the MOH is doing/has done and we are expected to believe that health care is affordable. (Or so Molly thought. But Molly confesses that she isn't a great reader.)
Ms. Sim tells us that “[b]etween 2001 and 2006, total admissions to public acute hospitals went up by 2.9 per cent because of two main reasons: our population had gone up by 8.5 per cent, and the elderly population (over 65) had increased by 25.8 per cent.”
While Molly doesn’t really know what an acute hospital is, she is wondering if various aspects of public policy were actually shaped together with population policy. We know that there were 2.7 million people in Singapore in 1990 as compared to the current 4.3 million people. We know that we have a declining birth rate, so the huge increase can be partly attributed to the opening of Singapore’s doors to lots and lots of foreign talents. Did our farsighted government shape other aspects of public policy, from health care to land transport, to prevent problems from arising due to the increase? Or did our government prefer to wait for the problems to surface and then attempt to deal with them?
According to Ms. Sim, “MOH has been actively managing the increased demand, by maximising our resources, cutting wastage and avoiding unnecessary hospitalisation.”
Pardon Molly for being a bad reader, but she is thinking that this sentence makes it sound as if the MOH was responding to problems brought about by the population increase and the aging population instead of preventing implementing policies to prevent the problems from surfacing. No matter how well the government is dealing with the problems after they have surfaced, there is still a sense that it had perhaps failed to implement policies to cope with challenges brought about by the then impending demographic changes during the nineties. In other words, the government knew that the population was aging and it should have known that its foreign talent frenzy was to bring about massive population increases, but did it do anything in areas ranging from public hospital beds to the roads and to public transport?
Ms. Sim also tells us that “there is a limit to” the efforts mentioned above, so “we have been adding hospital beds and will continue to do so. As all the beds added were in the subsidised wards, not surprisingly the proportion of our patients in subsidised wards went up ‘sharply’.”
This sounds a little strange to Molly for she thought that one of the reasons for implementing means testing was that too many miserly “rich” people are going for subsidized wards. But from what Ms. Sim said, it would sound as if it was the increased availability of hospital beds in subsidized wards that led to the sharp increase in the proportion of patients in subsidized wards. It’s almost as though more people are going for subsidized wards because that’s where the beds are and it’s so much not a matter of people “abusing” the hospital subsidies to which they should be entitled as citizens anyway.
In any case, the most fascinating point that Ms. Julie Sim brings up is this:
This is a uniquely Singaporean concept and it seem to Molly to be of a level of ludicrity so unprecedented in history that it deserves a patent. I think this concept was first used for bus fare hikes. It was said that small frequent increases of bus fares were better than less frequent but bigger increases. It is absurd because it seems to be like an almost purely psychological effect on consumers instead of having any tangible effects on actual affordability.
Let’s assume I buy Product X very often. The argument goes that there is a good situation and a bad situation. To simplify the two situations:
Bad Situation
Year 2003: Product X costs $50
Year 2007: Product X costs $75
If I buy Product X very often, I would be paying $50 from 2003 to 2006, then there will be one painful increase to $75 in 2007.
Good Situation
Year 2003: Product X costs $50
Year 2004: Product X costs $57
Year 2005: Product X costs $63
Year 2006: Product X costs $70
Year 2007: Product X costs $75
If I buy Product X very often, I would still have to pay $75 in 2007, a relatively small increase of $5 from 2006.
But the truth is that compared to the first situation, I have to pay so much more from 2004 to 2006 for that psychological effect of having a “less painful” increase. (Of course, the two situations are simplified. In the second situation, it could be that the company that sells Product X is so happy with all the profits it is earning along the way that the price would only have increased to, say, $70 by 2007. But, still, is that good for me as a consumer?)
Going back to Ms. Sim’s point, things get even more absurd. It is not as if most people keep getting hospitalized. Take Molly for example. She was hospitalized in 2004, but not for many years before that and hopefully not for many years after that. When Molly was hospitalized in 2004, any small increment that year would have affected her directly. How could the increment have minimized her burden??
If the small increment works so well, perhaps the government could consider making small and frequent increments to the proportion of hospital bills it subsidizes without having us extra taxes?
Well, I don’t know. Sorry if this blog entry doesn’t inform, educate or reassure anyone. (Bear in mind, though, that this isn’t the ST.)
In the footsteps of a certain Ms. Bhavani who became rather famous last year for her commandments regarding the role of journalists, Ms. Julie Sim from the Ministry of Health (Media Relations) has decided to tell the Straits Times (the premium pro-gahmen paper) what it should do after its health correspondent Salma Khalik wrote about the rising hospital fees and the implementation means testing. The authoritative MOH version of the bible for journalists goes:
We hope that ST can do its part to help educate, inform and reassure Singaporeans. It is not helpful to alarm the public unnecessarily.
Allow Pastor Molly Meek to extrapolate a code of behavior for Straits Times journalists from these two verses:
1. The Straits Times has a role to “help.” Molly assumes this means that paper has to “help” government ministries. (Don’t ask me why.)
2. “Educating” the public is not a matter of raising questions regarding the establishment or certain phenomena associated with the current status quo. It is presumably a matter of regurgitating what the representatives of government ministries have to say.
3. Similarly, the public is not “informed” by articles that offer alternatives to perspectives that are contrary to the government’s. Informing the public is also a matter of telling the public what government ministries have to say or want it to believe.
4. The Straits Times has a role to “reassure” the public. It cannot report any worrying trends in society, but should lull the people into a state of
Having such high standards for journalists, one can be assured that Ms. Sim’s letter to the Straits Times will certainly educate, inform and reassure Singaporeans - perhaps with the exception of some treacherous bimbos who refuse to be educated. Yes, it’s really educational and informative. Except that Molly read the whole article without understanding how health care "remains affordable" to her. She was wondering: if health care was not affordable in the past to begin with, how could it possibly remain affordable? And interestingly, Ms. Sim doesn't seem to have anything to say about how people are coping with hospital bills. Instead, she has an industrious list of what the MOH is doing/has done and we are expected to believe that health care is affordable. (Or so Molly thought. But Molly confesses that she isn't a great reader.)
Ms. Sim tells us that “[b]etween 2001 and 2006, total admissions to public acute hospitals went up by 2.9 per cent because of two main reasons: our population had gone up by 8.5 per cent, and the elderly population (over 65) had increased by 25.8 per cent.”
While Molly doesn’t really know what an acute hospital is, she is wondering if various aspects of public policy were actually shaped together with population policy. We know that there were 2.7 million people in Singapore in 1990 as compared to the current 4.3 million people. We know that we have a declining birth rate, so the huge increase can be partly attributed to the opening of Singapore’s doors to lots and lots of foreign talents. Did our farsighted government shape other aspects of public policy, from health care to land transport, to prevent problems from arising due to the increase? Or did our government prefer to wait for the problems to surface and then attempt to deal with them?
According to Ms. Sim, “MOH has been actively managing the increased demand, by maximising our resources, cutting wastage and avoiding unnecessary hospitalisation.”
Pardon Molly for being a bad reader, but she is thinking that this sentence makes it sound as if the MOH was responding to problems brought about by the population increase and the aging population instead of preventing implementing policies to prevent the problems from surfacing. No matter how well the government is dealing with the problems after they have surfaced, there is still a sense that it had perhaps failed to implement policies to cope with challenges brought about by the then impending demographic changes during the nineties. In other words, the government knew that the population was aging and it should have known that its foreign talent frenzy was to bring about massive population increases, but did it do anything in areas ranging from public hospital beds to the roads and to public transport?
Ms. Sim also tells us that “there is a limit to” the efforts mentioned above, so “we have been adding hospital beds and will continue to do so. As all the beds added were in the subsidised wards, not surprisingly the proportion of our patients in subsidised wards went up ‘sharply’.”
This sounds a little strange to Molly for she thought that one of the reasons for implementing means testing was that too many miserly “rich” people are going for subsidized wards. But from what Ms. Sim said, it would sound as if it was the increased availability of hospital beds in subsidized wards that led to the sharp increase in the proportion of patients in subsidized wards. It’s almost as though more people are going for subsidized wards because that’s where the beds are and it’s so much not a matter of people “abusing” the hospital subsidies to which they should be entitled as citizens anyway.
In any case, the most fascinating point that Ms. Julie Sim brings up is this:
But as costs inevitably go up with rising wages [whose?!] and more costly medication and other supplies, fees have to be adjusted regularly. Hospitals have been mindful of the need to ensure that the increases do not pose an undue burden to our patients. Hence they go for small incremental adjustments, rather than less frequent but large changes. (Emphasis Molly's)
This is a uniquely Singaporean concept and it seem to Molly to be of a level of ludicrity so unprecedented in history that it deserves a patent. I think this concept was first used for bus fare hikes. It was said that small frequent increases of bus fares were better than less frequent but bigger increases. It is absurd because it seems to be like an almost purely psychological effect on consumers instead of having any tangible effects on actual affordability.
Let’s assume I buy Product X very often. The argument goes that there is a good situation and a bad situation. To simplify the two situations:
Bad Situation
Year 2003: Product X costs $50
Year 2007: Product X costs $75
If I buy Product X very often, I would be paying $50 from 2003 to 2006, then there will be one painful increase to $75 in 2007.
Good Situation
Year 2003: Product X costs $50
Year 2004: Product X costs $57
Year 2005: Product X costs $63
Year 2006: Product X costs $70
Year 2007: Product X costs $75
If I buy Product X very often, I would still have to pay $75 in 2007, a relatively small increase of $5 from 2006.
But the truth is that compared to the first situation, I have to pay so much more from 2004 to 2006 for that psychological effect of having a “less painful” increase. (Of course, the two situations are simplified. In the second situation, it could be that the company that sells Product X is so happy with all the profits it is earning along the way that the price would only have increased to, say, $70 by 2007. But, still, is that good for me as a consumer?)
Going back to Ms. Sim’s point, things get even more absurd. It is not as if most people keep getting hospitalized. Take Molly for example. She was hospitalized in 2004, but not for many years before that and hopefully not for many years after that. When Molly was hospitalized in 2004, any small increment that year would have affected her directly. How could the increment have minimized her burden??
If the small increment works so well, perhaps the government could consider making small and frequent increments to the proportion of hospital bills it subsidizes without having us extra taxes?
Well, I don’t know. Sorry if this blog entry doesn’t inform, educate or reassure anyone. (Bear in mind, though, that this isn’t the ST.)
