ABSTRACT
Prudent health care policies that encourage public-private participation in health care financing and provisioning have conferred on Singapore the advantage of flexible response as it faces the potentially conflicting challenges of becoming a regional medical hub attracting foreign patients and ensuring domestic access to affordable health care. Both the external and internal health care markets are two sides of the same coin, the competition to be decided on price and quality. For effective regulation, a tripartite model, involving not just the government and providers but empowered consumers, is needed. Government should distance itself from the provider role while providers should compete – and cooperate – to create higher-value health care systems than what others can offer. Health care policies should be better informed by health policy research.
Should health care services be publicly or privately funded? And should these services be publicly or privately provided? The answers to these questions largely depend on whether one considers health care a public or a private good.
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