Advertisement
Hong Kong healthcare and hospitals
Hong KongHealth & Environment

Former Hong Kong health chief slams medical voucher scheme for the elderly as lax, flawed and ‘not cost-effective’

  • Nearly 80 per cent of elderly residents still use public health care, which does not help city’s overcrowded hospitals
  • Government has earmarked HK$4.2 billion for the plan in the 2019-20 budget

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Elderly residents in North Fanling. The Hong Kong government said that residents aged 65 and older were six times more likely to require hospitalisation than younger residents. Photo: Felix Wong
Emily Tsang

A voucher scheme that gives elderly Hong Kong residents HK$2,000 a year to use for private health care has failed to ease overcrowding at public hospitals and not been cost-effective, the city’s former top health official said on Monday.

Advertisement

Professor Yeoh Eng-kiong, now head of public health and primary care at Chinese University, said even years after the programme was adopted, 78 per cent of elderly patients still went to public clinics, while 73 per cent did so before the vouchers were introduced.

Yeoh, who led a university study of the programme between 2015 and 2018, said the government needed to overhaul the voucher scheme to better help the elderly get health screenings and manage chronic diseases – the best long-term ways to promote health and cut hospital visits.

He said it was good that the government on Monday proposed a cap of HK$2,000 (US$255) every two years on the share of the voucher that can be spent on optometry. But Yeoh, who was health minister from 1999 to 2004, said more radical reforms were needed to correct the scheme’s shortcomings.

The government earmarked HK$4.2 billion for the plan in the 2019-20 budget, a 33 per cent increase from the year before.

City’s optometrists fume over proposed medical voucher cap

“Now that we have been lax, it is already too difficult to go back and bring in more restrictions,” Yeoh said. He added that political concerns also complicated the issue.

Advertisement