Govt-owned ‘private’ hospitals

By Anil Netto,

With the federal and state governments and GLCs holding stakes in an increasing number of private hospitals, is there a conflict of interest?
Blog reader Ganesh shares his thoughts.

If you see the private hospitals, some of them are virtually owned either directly or indirectly by the government.
So, the government has absolutely no incentive to build more new government hospitals nor to upgrade existing government hospitals at all.
That is the biggest problems now. The (government-owned) ‘private’ hospitals are doing so well and the government is reaping so much of money from them that, in my humble opinion, there is a conflict of interest here.
Why should they even build or improve existing government hospitals?
Has anyone gone and seen the KL general hospital lately? It is shocking: the buildings look so old and run down and it is so disheartening to even enter the place. Even more so, when one is used to going to places like SJMC (SDMC now), to go to the KL GH is a sudden culture shock.
In other countries, for instance, the government hospitals and the private hospitals have really no difference. They both look posh and nice. For example, in the UK, I have been to many government NHS hospitals and they look like “hotels”. In other words, they even look better than our private hospitals here in Malaysia. The same with Singapore and Australia.
It is high time for a law to be passed that prohibits the government from owning or holding interests in private hospitals. Instead of spending tons of money building this and that, some an utter waste of money, we should be building more schools and government hospitals to cater for the poor and needy.
In fact, every state should have at least 10 large full-fledged government hospitals each.
It is high time we see something coming back from the taxes we pay.