Grappling with new problems and looking for new solutions

Public transport is a serious problem with rising cost and growing number of commuters but limited lines and roads. The population growth will outrun the availability of trains and buses and will cripple the economy and social life of the citizens earlier than you think.

The bigger problem is this new demon called medical cost. The Medishield Life and all kinds of insurance are fake or insincere attempts to solve the problem. It is not solving the problem but forcing the people to pay more and creating a bigger financial problem for the people. The stone mills of housing and owning a car and now a medical stone mill to hang on the people’s neck. For the rich it is no problem. To many Sinkies it is serious problem. When you don’t have the money means you don’t have the money to pay and 10c can also be a big problem.

Life insurance is a good thing that the pioneering generation did not to protect their families in the advent of premature death and the lost of household income, or the only breadwinner. Medical insurance was a luxury or something that was a non issue, not needed in the past. There was never a need to have medical insurance until the medical profession was allowed to turn into a money spinning machine and to hold ransom on the sick, rich or poor. Today they tell you your life is priceless and so you must pay as they demand from you.

The new generations have got used to the new normal of paying for expensive medical care and for having to wait for months and years for a medical appointment. It wasn’t like that before. It should not be this way until greed took over from the top to the toe. Greed is good, so let it be, just make the people pay.

We had free medical services, even free medicine in the past when our country was far from being rich. The country was a developing nation and thrift was the order of the day. But the govt of the day could provide free medical services and you don’t have to wait for more than a few hours to be admitted into a hospital. There were few hospital beds but enough to be waiting for patients. There were few doctors but enough doctors to see the patient even on appointment basis.

We are filthy rich today, if that is the truth. We have more hospitals than the past, more doctors and specialists, and we are caught in a bind. And medical cost keeps ballooning as if a natural phenomenon, a good thing for the GDP and a good justification for those whose income depends on it.

What went wrong? Nothing? The philosophy was wrong, the policies were wrong, the mission was wrong, everything was wrong. But no one wants to know what went wrong. The only thing they know is to make the people pay and pay. If people cannot pay today, make sure they pay by instalments for the whole life. There is the Medisave Minimum Sum waiting to be milked dry. It is so convenient.

When the Medishield Life is in force, the demand for medical services will hit the roof. Why not, when everything is already paid out front? There were no medical insurance in the past and there was no over over demand for medical services. There is high manipulated population growth today, but why are medical services, facilities, professionals lacking the population growth? Who allows the cost of medical services to run wild by not manipulating it to a reasonable and humanly affordable level? The cost of medical services today is only affordable to the immortals, not ordinary human beans.

Without addressing and arresting the high medical cost, all the solutions are fake and feeble attempts to solve a real problem.

In the past, the doctors charged the patients according to their worth, not so much as according to the illness. There is some wisdom to it. Rob from the rich and pay the poor. There is another reason, the lives of the poor are less worthy and the cost of medicine could be more than the patient’s worth. How much is a down and out loser’s life worth compares to a super rich talent? The idealist and naïve will tell you that every life is valuable and priceless. Really? I choose to disagree and respect your views that all lives are priceless and must be saved and everyone must dutifully be forced to pay a ransom to be kept alive, like it or not, worth it or not.

Everyone shall be entitled to place a value on his own life and decide if he/she wants to pay the price and what price to live. It must not be a compulsion by some other beans that may have other agendas to make the poor pay for something they don’t need or cannot afford when their little money could be put to better use.

It is better to have a little money to live well than to have no money and live miserably, with no dignity.

Kopi level - Green

Running out of space now matter what

Sitting at my office in MBFC and enjoying the vast expanse of the sea and the marina gives me a very strange feeling. The very spot where I was sitting was the sea, nearly a kilometer from the former shore line at ‘Ang Teng’ or Clifford Pier. And looking ahead, there is another kilometer or more of reclaimed land before the new coastline. So much land has been added but will never be enough.

Practically every piece of the new land created is now occupied, built up or in the process of development. Instead of creating more land for recreation, to improve the life of the people, oh yes, the development for economic reasons is also to improve the people’s life, the new land are being filled up and used up immediately. And soon people will be demanding for more land.

If we don’t kill the idea of putting more people on this island, no amount of land reclamation will be enough. Even building a few more Towers of Babel will not be enough. We are small, very small, a speck as far as land is concerned. 

There is a serious need to rethink on what we should do with the lives of the citizens and the limited land that we have. It cannot keep going on like this and thinking that it can go on and on. There is a heavy price to pay for going down this road. Why keep creating space only to fill them up with more people? We would never even be bigger than Bintan. We need to be very prudent in the use of our land. And the last thing, to bring in more people to occupy them.

Saw an Army recruitment advertisement in the ST this morning. It has this flashed, ‘How far would you go to protect our home?’ Do we need to protect our home when it is occupied and stuffed with foreigners, many with new pink ICs? Wait for the day when Sinkies would have to rent a place to sleep from foreigners and foreigners turned citizens.

Maybe this would not happen as many foreigners are buying the properties and accepting the pink ICs temporarily. They would sell the properties back to the Sinkies at a high profit before returning or departing to somewhere else. Only daft Sinkies have to grab a home at whatever price to put a roof over their heads.

Full time MP not a good idea

A very strange article by Rachel Chang in yesterday’s ST made me wonder why she wrote it and what made her came to such a conclusion. At the end of her piece she finally said, ‘MPs here rarely draft laws, and the scrutiny process over government Bills is brief and uncomplex compared with other legislatures…no need to travel long distances to get back to their home constituencies from the capital, nor are they required to raise huge amounts of funds for political activities…’ She took note of the Meet the People Session and the increasing workload but not enough to justify full time MP.

There is also a lack of interest among MPs and potential MPs who are successful professionals to want to give up their profession to be full time MPs. The $16,000 is just not attractive enough for the big income earners to want to become full time MPs.

So, which is the more important justification to say that full time MP is not a good idea, not enough meaningful work or the income of professionals is too good to forgo? It is understandable that top income earners would have little inspiration to want to go into politics and to sacrifice their huge personal income. But this can be resolved in two ways, one, make them ministers or ministers of state when the multi million dollar package will be fairly compatible. The other golden goose that could be a good alternative is to allow them to take up as many directorships as they like. After all the workload of an MP does not need the attention of a full time MP. A caveat is that high earning professionals will make good MPs or even ministers. The reality has proven otherwise. Professionals with their hearts misplaced can caused more harm than good.

There are other views of why people want to become an MP. Some see it as a calling, to serve the people and country, and money is not the most important thing to them. A good example is Chen Show Mao. Some may have made enough bucks and would want to do something more meaningful than just trying to fatten their bank accounts for several generations to feed on.

Seriously, who gave Rachel Chang the idea that MP’s workload is nothing more than a part time job? Actually, an MP’s job can be a part time job and also a full time job. It depends on how much the person is willing to put himself into the affairs of the state and the welfare of the people. If an MP thinks his job is to just spend a little time to meet the people, have a few walkabouts, shake a few hands and kiss a few babies, and suka suka attend a few parliamentary sessions since they are not much legislative work to do except to vote yes or no, then it is indeed a part time job. A machine could do just as fine and cheaper for sure. A machine also does not have a heart.

On the other hand an MP could be so involved in the affairs of the state and the people that there is just not enough time even for a full time MP. It is relative and how one looks at the MP job and how important is his role to better the lives of the people in his constituency and across the nation. Voting in parliament without having to think does not need much time, just 30 seconds to raise the hand.

In a way, a PM or a Minister too can be a part time job. But some will need 25 hours a day to do his job well, or still cannot do his job well. And there are MPs that are so free or so efficient that they can take on as many directorships as they like, advisory roles and full time jobs and still got time to spare to play golf or engage in their favourite past times.

What do you think, MP should be part time or full time?

Kopi level - Yellow

MOM hiring Indian agency to check on CVs and certifications

Dataflow Services has been engaged by the MOM to do random checks on the certificates of Indian professionals working here. About 500 to 600 checks will be conducted annually at $100, and each search must be completed within 4 weeks. With about 200,000 Indian PMEs here, at 500 a year, a complete inventory checks, assuming no more new PMEs arriving, it would take about 400 years to do the job. Maybe Dataflow is not the only agency doing the job. Also maybe a sample check will do as not the whole 200,000 PMEs will be submitting fake qualifications and CVs.

And of course the cost to conduct such investigations is going to be a multi million dollar business with such a high volume of traffic. It becomes a case of want to do or not wanting to do and how much to spend to be effective. What is certain is that hiring foreigners is not going to be a cheaper option anymore. This hidden cost, other than other social and security cost, and the cost of making fools of local PMEs and making them jobless and affecting the soundness of our society, all added up to make this option not that simple or desirable. The best way out is to pretend that everything is ok, don’t check and bury the head in the sand.

How effective will this move be, it is something that has to be done, when the employment of foreigners has become a highly complicated system of fraud with many layers of supporting services to hide the fraud? The problem is so complex that it would need a whole series of counter measures to remove all the fakes that have gone pass our immigration doors. It is becoming a spy vs spy or spooks vs spooks game. And many of the fakes have been so deeply buried that by now they would have chalked in a series of genuine CVs that they could erase their fake CVs of the past. It is like a successful and rich criminal walking around in suits and being driven around in limousines without a trace of their dirty past lingering around them.

We have let this problem to fester for too long and the damage done is so serious and damaging to the citizen PMEs and even the lives of the innocents who have to go under the hands of the fakes. It really beats me to think that it takes so long to realise that we have been cheated by lowly 3^rd cheats. And now the problem has grown so huge that it will literally take hundreds of man years to unravel the mistakes of the past.

There may be a new profession, something like who is to check on the watchdogs assigned or paid to be watchdogs?

The big bangs that went poofs

There were several big bangs that were supposed to cause a big excitement or causes for jubilation. The first was the attack on the WP in the cleaning of hawker centre ceilings. If the accusations stick, it will definitely undermine the credibility of the rising political star party. Unfortunately the story had to come to a premature ending when some notes in the minutes were not in order. Nothing was heard since then.

Next came the PAP’s end of the year party caucus that was meant to be a battle cry, to raise the tempo ahead of the next GE. The young turks led by Chan Chun Sing declared that the party would take the fight to the people, to every corner of the island, to win the right to be the ruling party again. Again things did not go that way when the whole campaign was hijacked or thrown aside by the once in 50 year unexpected riot in Little India. That event shook the very core of the social fabric and got everyone’s attention. The pronouncement at the party caucus became a non event, forgotten, pissssed.

More bangs were lined up but fizzled out along the way. The Media Corp big bang at the Marina Bay year end celebration was meant to be another big PR event on how far and how successful we have been. It suffered the fate of another failed event when it was attacked for having too many Channel 8 artistes present and the use of Mandarin in a Channel 5 event even though Mandarin is an official language. It just did not go down well with the Channel 5 viewers and ended with many excuses and damage control measures.

A big party was also arranged in the 8^th Wonder of the World, though a miniature one in the form of the most expensive stretch of expressway cutting under the sea. It was touted as a great engineering feat and architectural wonder only to be bashed by the most massive traffic congestion the next morning. A great PR event, never mind the money spent, to create free flow of traffic ended with a 3 hour traffic jam and many angry motorists paying to be in the jam. No more harping about how great it was meant to be.

There are several other big bangs that were worth crowing about but faded into oblivion. Just to mention another piece, the wonder Jewel to be built at Changi Airport, touted as a game changer with a billion dollar price tag to propel Changi as the choice destination for air travelers was shot down by many quarters for a failed concept. A weak attempt to deflect the negative comments soon faded away as well.

These big bang potential events marked the closing chapter of 2013 and the new chapter of 2014. The big bangs went poof. Nothing much to cheer about or to jump in joy.

The latest follow-ups, the farmer festival in Little India, yesterday’s Thaipusam and the coming Chinese New Year could bring a little joy and normalcy back to a city trying to celebrate and party the whole year round, signs of more good years and more good times. A nation in perpetual celebration and joy.

Kopi level - Green