— Mustafa K. Anuar
The Malaysian Insider
Feb 04, 2012

FEB 4 — Supposedly based on the UK National Health Service (NHS), the 1Care scheme is said to be aimed at financing the supposedly increasing costs of public health care while making it still affordable to the lower-income group.

But we fear that, like most other “restructuring” schemes in the past, 1Care will deliberately result in the escalation of costs to ordinary Malaysians and the outsourcing of contracts to corporate interests — financed by public funds.

The direct beneficiaries — private hospitals, health management organisations, pharmaceutical firms and those administering the national health financing fund — are likely to profit handsomely from this scheme at the expense of the public.

We recall how the costs of pharmaceuticals soared after the Government Medical Store was privatised in 1994. A similar rise was seen in the costs of general hospital support services after they were privatised. Read the rest of this entry »