Take Care of Your Own B***** Finances

Amidst all the hype about allowing patients with chronic illness to pay for their medicine using Medisave, we are having a problem right at our doorsteps. Patients who were already using Medisave to pay for their transplant medicine are rapidly depleting their accounts and also over-claiming.

Gist of the claiming system is a patient fills up a Medisave form to claim the medicine for a month. If the doctor prescribes more than a month's worth of medicine, the patient can claim for more than a month in that visit. Eg. if the medicine is for 3 months, they just need to fill up 3 forms, one for each month. However, there are patients who come almost every month and claimed for more than a month's medicine each time. They eventually end up claiming right up to some months in yr 2007. CPF then no longer allow further deductions from these accounts and the hospital sends the full bill to the patients.

Naturally some patients started calling up and were angry at why the hospital is charging them the full price of the medication when they are suppose to pay using Medisave. In order to help curb such problems from happening, finance actually had the stupidity to suggest pharmacy department keep a list of patients who are using their Medisave to pay for the medicine and manually record the months which the patients are claiming for. Why should we be doing financial tracking for the patients?!

Does IRAS bother to tell you your bank account has got no money before they deduct the income tax via GIRO? IRAS will probably just send you a letter telling you to pay up the tax + penalty + interest for late payment if they cannot deduct the money from the bank account. And whose fault is that?

Singaporeans got to start learning to take their finances in hand and they got to learn that modern day economy no longer revolves cash that is tangible. Cyber numbers are money too. Just because you can't feel it does not mean they are not real.