Hands off IJN, please

(Rocky Bru)Anyone with a heart will be alarmed with Sime Darby's proposal to take over the IJN and turn it into its own revenue generator. The IJN, of National Heart Institute, was built for the rakyat. The reason why the Government set it up when Dr Mahathir Mohamad was PM was because most people could not afford to go to private hospitals.
85 per cent of IJN's patients are poor people. Which means that their bills are sponsored/subsidized by the Government.

I doubt that Sime Darby, the world's largest merged plantation entity, is interested in the IJN for CSR reasons.

My question is, who's idea is it to hive off IJN to Sime? The Edge's Financial Daily today, on it front page, carries the report "Sime Darby eyes IJN", with a sub-heading "Health Ministry objects to MoF's proposal to hive off heart hospital".

MoF's proposal? The Minister of Finance Inc owns 99 per cent of IJN.

Extract:

"Many of IJN's doctors are leaving because the remuneration is not attractive enough. With Sime Darby in the picture, the doctors would be better paid ...".

Is that so? I asked the IJN people and what they told me was:

"Of course, there is turnover but none of our consultants has left us. What's more important is that the hospital's service is not adversely affected by it".

According to my sources, the IJN knows nuts about the MoF's proposal. Over to the Minister of Finance, then ...

Read the original scoop by SimeDarbyWatch, here.

p.s. Read this piece on Sime's Motor Division gets panicky as well.
I thought after the Sime Bank's RM400 million fiasco in the 1990s, which brought many people to their knees, the corporation was going to stick to what it knows best? I've just learned that healthcare is now a core business of Sime's ...