Dr. Sean Masaki Flynn is an economist who gave a speech on the differences between the United States healthcare system and Singapore’s in 2020. In his speech, he points out the flaws of the American healthcare system, and how a system mirroring Singapore's could solve many of its issues.
Singapore’s current healthcare system can be broken down into 3 parts: MediShield, MediSave, and MediFund. The combination of these three sectors has allowed Singapore to decrease its spending to a mere 4% of its GDP. Despite its decrease in spending, Singapore remains one of the best healthcare systems in the world. The first part of Singapore's healthcare system is MediShield. MediShield is the high deductible insurance plan that citizens must first pay, once the deductible is met then the citizen must only pay 10% of the cost from further medical bills. This portion of Singapore's system is crucial to cutting costs and saving the country money. By ensuring that citizens always have a monetary stake in their choice of medical provider patients choose to save themselves more money and simultaneously the government. Medisave, the second M of Singapore’s system, is the health savings account Singapore requires all of its citizens to have, and 7% of each paycheck is directly sent into this account. Dr. Flynn points out that this portion of Singapore's system would greatly benefit Americans since many people are poor savers, and putting away a large piece of money a month is often not prioritized. He also mentions that politically in the U.S. this portion of the system would likely not pass. Due to many people not wanting money taken from their paychecks, politicians would not have the support and backing needed to pass a bill for mandatory savings. The final portion of the healthcare system is MediFund. MediFund is the final safety net Singapore provides for its citizens. The country set aside 5 billion dollars to ensure that in the case of citizens not being able to pay for their health services after spending all of their MediSave accounts would still be able to receive the same care and would not have to worry about the healthcare cost.
The Singaporean system seems much less complex than that of the U.S. Since the U.S. allows for third-party involvement through insurance, the ability for Americans to get the healthcare they need is strained. Since healthcare providers must go through insurance, patients are not able to know the cost of their surgeries or treatments, that is of course if the insurance deems it necessary in the first place. If the United States is able to move towards a Singaporean system or even towards the Wholefoods model he mentioned then the United States would be able to save trillions of dollars, and Americans can have more affordable healthcare.
