The Malaysian Healthcare system is a medicine-chest full of inadequacies and inequities. The result is an inappropriate healthcare protection and unacceptable differences in resources and health conditions related to income, race, and location.
Resources are misallocated, the healthcare infrastructure in highland interior communities is inadequate and/or improbably developed or mismanaged, and our financial support for health coverage is disjointed (with public, voluntary non-profit and the binary public-privatised and commercialised entities that sustained through sure profit-taking) and inefficient through misalignment of ( and misallocation in ) public funding.
It is time to move towards a healthcare system in the country that provides adequate, affordable, and accessible care to all rakyat2, and that in attempting to reach this goal by refining existing administration, programs, infrastructure implementation correcting this legacy system, and using the power of federalism to develop the underdeveloped healthcare system, administration and implementation in country.
Achieving this goal requires country:
TO create an effective, grassroots community-based healthcare system by expanding health clinics, creating other local points of access, focusing on social determinants of health, and addressing gaps in the present Social Security and private corporate and commercial-available insurance schemes.
TO reform the tax treatment of employment-based coverage through creating innovative universal subsidies that allow effective choices of coverage in an arrangement that could be best described as “Healthcare Benefits for All.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the profound weaknesses of the Malaysian healthcare system, in particular the enormous inequities that pervade it. The virus has highlighted these gaps and made them worse.
Unemployment, and underemployment, during the pandemic meant that as many as 2 million Malaysians might be affected, excluding the 5-million migrant workers without proper healthcare provision.
The Covid19 pandemic has laid bare who would be isolated, vaccined, and subsequently propey health-protected nationwide.
The Covid19 pandemic has also exacerbated the sharp differences in health services and outcomes between nationality and income groups pointing the real and presence weakness of our public and private healthcare systems, overwhelming already overstrained and underfunded local clinics and rural poliklinik and healthcare workers.
The COVID-19 has accentuated as never before the interlinked ecological, epidemiological, and economic vulnerabilities imposed upon an already weakened – and stagnated – politico-economy environment.
The overhauling of our healthcare systems requires drastic yet overwhelming reconstruction of politico-economy mindset and a dismantling of legacy administrative systems.
[ An expanded version – with cited sources, material-contents’ links, references and an exploratory discussion – is AVAILABLE HERE ]
Firestorms 