The Price of Good Health
Healthcare that is affordable, accessible and high quality comes at a price. Salma Khalik finds out how Singapore is striking the right balance.
The Straits Times, 10 Apr 2025
Spending on healthcare in Singapore could soon become the single biggest item in the Government’s coffers, said Health Minister Ong Ye Kung, as he assured Singaporeans that their basic healthcare needs will continue to be affordable.
In 2025, the Government has set aside $20.9 billion for health, second only to spending on defence, which has a budget of $23.4 billion.
Citing the trajectory of government healthcare expenditure, which had gone up from $9 billion in 2015, the year he joined politics, to $18 billion in 2024, Mr Ong predicted that by 2030, it would likely be close to $30 billion a year.
A lot of the money will go towards building more facilities, including new hospitals, nursing homes and community care centres, and for manpower costs.
But a substantial portion will be spent on subsidies to keep costs down for patients.
“We can make it affordable to the patient, but there’s no doubt that with an older population, healthcare expenditure, whether by the Government or nationally, is going to go up,” he told The Straits Times in an exclusive interview.
Older people not only tend to get sick more frequently, but they are also more sick and stay longer in hospitals as many have more than one medical condition.
Mr Ong said: “You’re seeing a lot more older patients coming in, not because of very severe diseases, but due to infections. Because they are old, there is underlying illness after Covid-19. They are more frail and one infection is all it takes for them to be in the ICU (intensive care unit).”
As a result, the average length of stay in public hospitals has gone up, from 6.1 days in 2019 to seven days by 2022. This represents a 15 per cent increase in patient load, he added. While this trend worries him, Mr Ong is confident that the quality of healthcare for patients in the future will not suffer as a result of the higher demand.
Even as the quality of healthcare here has been getting better over the years, with advances in medical science and technology, he said the Government will continue to enhance the definition of basic healthcare, which it has always promised will remain affordable. As an example, he pointed to the announcement that from October, MediShield Life will start covering treatments using cell, tissue and gene therapy products.
These are individualised treatments tailored to a person’s specific medical problem, some of which were previously untreatable. As each treatment is designed and produced for a specific patient, the cost is high.
The move marks an “inflection point” for basic healthcare here, said Mr Ong. In spite of the high cost, he said “we decided that this is the way to go” because today, if there is an available treatment, people expect to have access to it.
“At some point, that becomes people’s expectation. So we have to start embracing this,” he said.
This is one reason why a large part of government expenditure will go towards subsidising healthcare costs. People will also have to share in the cost of better care, largely with insurance and their MediSave funds, Mr Ong said.
The good news is that the Government is unlikely to need to raise taxes to pay for the higher healthcare expenditure, he added.
Said Mr Ong: “We expect our GDP (gross domestic product) to grow. So long as the Singapore economy grows, tax receipts will go up. And a big part of it, a significant part of it in future, will be for healthcare.”