nkf reducing dialysis by $4

gerard ee announces that dialysis fee will now go down by $4 and another $8 later. total reduction over the last few months came to an overall reduction of 25%! what does this mean? the patients were paying so much more unnecessarily due to nkf's inefficiency or what? the monthly expenditure for a patient is $2,730. this will be reduced eventually to $2045. but still a huge sum for any poor bugger or even not so poor buggers. and to qualify for partial subsidy, the cut off household income is $3,500. without going into details of how much is partial subsidy proportional to income less than $3,500, lets look at those whose household income is above this magical number. and assuming that this is nett and not before cpf reduction. technically, a patient with $3,600 will be disqualify from subsidy and has to pay the full amount of $2,730. what is left of the $3,600? $870!!! even with a household income of $4,000, the disposal income left is only $1,270. almost 3/4 of the household income for dialysis. that is what people think a kidney patient deserves to live on, or his family deserves to live on. is that mean? and they have mean testing to ensure that this is so.