I was at a Club Rainbow function once and spent considerable amount of time talking to the parents. It is so tough for them to cope with a child with medical needs in terms of man effort and all of them spoke of the high cost just adds to their burden.

We have a low tax near zero welfare system so the govt passes the responsibility of taking care of the old to the children, passes the cost of medical care to the sick, paases the responsibility of caring for the elderly back to the elderly …and so on. The unfortunate carry their own burdens…superimpose this on top of the big income gap. So where is the risk pooling mechansim in our society…..ITS EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF…you make money you keep, you get a misfortune take care of it yourself, …after a while you will get a lot of people who don’t care, they will just leave when they can.

What good is a system that leaves out the most severe cases? We have about 33,000 children born every year and about 1.5-2% of them will be born with congenital problems. We are talking about 400 babies every year. Assuming the cost is $100K we are talking about $40M that is roughly $1K per child born. $40M…it is not that the govt cannot afford to solve this – it is what priority the govt gives to this problem. We spend billions every year on guns and planes that we probably won’t use to fight but cannot do this for the parents of Singaporean babies who need our help the most…it is unconscionable.