From the straitss times.
AUG 27, 2003
Hospital cost table a good idea but...
Some say it is hard to tell actual quality of care from figures for fees and length of hospital stay
By Lee Hui Chieh
WHEN Singaporeans shop around for hospital care, a true and complete picture of what is best is unlikely to come from just comparing prices or even the outcomes. Some doctors yesterday made this point about a government plan to give people such information, saying the data will not show quality of service which, they say, cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
However, all doctors and ordinary Singaporeans interviewed welcomed the comparative table to be published by year-end, which will give the average costs of operations, average length of stay and mortality rates for the most common procedures performed at both public and private hospitals.
Said the chairman of the government parliamentary committee for health, Dr Lily Neo: 'Hospitals will be made more conscious of their costs and cannot price themselves too much higher than the other hospitals.'
Agreeing, bank officer Vera Poon, 35, said: 'It's a good idea because then everything will be in the open and patients will know what they are paying for.'
But Dr Prem Kumar Nair, general manager of Raffles Medical Group's corporate services, said people had to be careful with comparisons. 'The comparison is a good start but it may be difficult to compare issues like quality of service and quality of care.'
Some doctors also said that the comparison might be unfair or misleading if variables such as the ages of the patients and the severity of their conditions were not taken into account when collating the figures.
Dr Lim Cheok Peng, managing director of the Parkway Group, which runs the Mount Elizabeth, Gleneagles and East Shore hospitals, said: 'Giving patients cost information is good in principle but how this is meaningfully presented is the crux. It is never an apple-to-apple comparison.'
Even if the other factors were taken into account, 'there are limitations as to how useful such data will be', said health economist Phua Kai Hong.
He explained that a hospital could, for example, discharge patients before they were fit to go home just so that its patients' average length of stay would appear shorter. That would make that hospital look more efficient and cheaper relative to other hospitals.
'But it would not mean it was better because this could lead to a situation where patients are not adequately treated and require re-admission into the hospital,' he said.
Copyright @ 2003 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.
The talk on being transparent. It's almost a reality, but I don't think it will pull through.
Once they reveal the cost, they will have patients knocking at their doors asking for their fees to match the lowest price the other hospital is offering.
But then, what are the motives of people in the medical industry? To serve the sick or to make money.
Once they reveal the cost, it's unlikely that they will be cable to charge premium for their services. But, I must say that not all are out to earn on people's plight.