Prefunded Medishield-life inordinately benefits new citizens and is a carrot to bait MORE new immigrants in.MOH:
"With pre-funding, members pay higher premiums during their working ages and, in return, can receive rebates to offset their own future premiums when they grow old."[
MOH: 'Role of pre-funding' (ST, 27Nov2013)]
Actually
, medisave (incepted 1984) currently is ALREADY a form of PRE-FUNDING since u can only use medisave$$ strictly for only healthcare use, and only in strictly rationed amounts (e.g. withdrawal limits for everything e.g. $300 p.a. for chronic disease use, maximum hospitalization/day claim etc etc, so that sufficient funds remain for use in old age.
Unless the gahmen is able to track an individual's medishield(current)/ medishield-life premiums paid thus far, an individual joining late at say 45+yrs old is likely to pay exactly the same premiums as one who joined since birth and had already paid significantly increased premiums due to the prefunding rule; the 1st 10yrs 30% p.a. surcharge notwithstanding (which the gahmen might in future suspend once it has collected the premium surcharge from existing non-medisave insured Singaporeans and PRs so as to make Singaporean citizenship attractive to new immigrants).
My suspicion is that the gahmen is using prefunding as a carrot to show how robust the medishield-life reserves are and how relatively cheap it is for a new immigrant of say 45yrs it is to acquire medical insurance, in the gahmen's ill-conceived effort to achieve its target population of 6.9million Singaporeans come year 2020.
The best defence against high healthcare costs is a healthy lifestyle (healthy diet, exercise and no-smoking) which the Singapore gahmen has quite obviously failed miserably in promoting as evidenced by its perverse attempt to make Singapore the Mecca for tobacco promotion to the rest of this region if not the whole world):
(Pict from:
'[Tobacco promotion] Is Bali governor less corrupted than ours???!!!')
Pray tell, please show me how my suspicions are wrong.
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Triple pre-funding of personal healthcare costs, How much pre-funding will settle the bill? (...to avoid tapping into medifund?)