Providing Good And Affordable Healthcare

17 Sep 2002

The Ministry of Health recently announced the revision of fees for hospital services in the public healthcare institutions. This revision was in response to increases in manpower costs and to keep in pace with advances in medical technology. The fee revision enables the public healthcare institutions to continue to provide good and affordable healthcare.

A main consideration in fee revision is to ensure a balance between affordability for the patients and the hospitals' longer-term financial viability. MOH is committed towards ensuring good and affordable healthcare to all Singaporeans. With government subsidies and our 3M system (i.e. Medisave, Medishield and Medifund), the fee revision would have minimal impact on the out of pocket (or cash) payment by subsidised patients.

Healthcare in Singapore is highly subsidised by the Government. For example, for C Class wards, the Government subsidises $264.66 million, or about 80.5% of the actual charges of $328.76 million. This is higher than our target subsidy of 80% for Class C wards. For B2 patients, the Government subsidises 69% of the total charges. This again is higher than the target subsidy rate of 65%.

On top of this, a large proportion of B2 and C Class patient bills are paid through Medisave, MediShield and Medifund. The payment from other sources, such as employees' medical benefits, private insurance schemes, and out-of-pocket cash, amounts to only about 3% of the total charges for both Class B2 and Class C.

As the average B2 and C patient bill sizes before revision are about $1205 and $756 respectively, the average increase in the patient bill size would range from $8 to $36, based on fee rate increases of 1-3% in most hospitals. Most patients would use their Medisave or Medishield to pay for this increase. Given that out-of-pocket payments go towards only a small proportion of the final patient bill, and that the increase in bill size is small, most Singaporeans would be able to afford the small out-of-pocket increases caused by the hospital fee revisions (See Table A for sources of payment for B2 & C class wards).

Patients should choose their ward class wisely. For Singaporeans who still cannot afford to pay even the highly subsidised rates due to financial hardship, they can apply for Medifund. They should approach the hospitals' medical social workers for assistance. The Ministry would like to give the assurance that no Singaporeans would be denied essential medical care because of their inability to pay.