Press Releases

Transcript of media session by SHWF on health care reform

Following is the transcript (English portion) of a media session by the Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food, Dr York Chow, after attending a radio programme this morning (July 20):


Reporter: Dr Chow, your document has actually created quite a lot of worries on people who are in the middle class. You are saying that the medical cost is rising, they may have to pay more tax to foot the bill of services that they may not be entitled to get. What do you think of this? How can you justify this?


Dr Chow: I think the unavoidable problem is that we need to pay more for health care services in the future. This is something we have to admit that it is a fact. I think our solution is to ensure that the money to be spent will be properly spent and will be targeted to the most needy areas. If we need to increase resources, we need to discuss where the resources should come from. I think if we keep on asking taxpayers to add on their contribution, there will be only 1.26 million people who are contributing and mainly 300,000 people who pay 85% of all the taxes. If we just increase the tax, of course the people who will suffer most are the middle class who pay most of the tax. But if we look at the whole health care expenditure, we want to have a much better funding system. Then we need to start planning who will be paying and how it should be paid; and how the money will be distributed: either you save money for future use or you save part of it and only use part of it to pool together to build up an insurance system. So all these are options that we will be discussing and we will be analysing in our next report.


Reporter: Are you hinting that a tax increase is infeasible?


Dr Chow: I think just by increasing tax in order to meet the health care expenditure. We will be really putting a lot of pressure on the existing taxpayers. I think it is not necessarily the best option.


Reporter: On family doctors, do you see that in the future we will have public family doctors working in the community?


Dr Chow: I think a lot of interest has been put on the family doctor concept. The reason why I put this up is mainly because we need to have doctors who are close to peoples' homes so that they can seek help as soon as possible. With continuity of care, the quality of care could also be much improved. Whether there would be public doctors or private doctors, it depends on how much the funding would go in the future. As most of the family practice is now delivered by private doctors, we feel that they actually have a very clear role and they can actually play a major part in this respect. The general out-patient clinics will still be in existence until the whole system is fully mature. The public system still needs to look after the poor and the needy and also to ensure that we have proper training for our family doctors.


(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript)





Ends/Wednesday, July 20, 2005

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