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Comment
Letter from Pulau Tikus |
| Privatisation I HAVE BEEN TOLD about two cases of heart bypass recently done by the Penang General hospital One patient, a retired teacher, paid RM111 for his operation; the other, a hawker, had his done for about RM500. True, they had to wait their turn but the job was done. This got me looking into the health services. I learnt that for one who is neither wealthy nor a government servant only the Penang General Hospital offers a cardiology unit. Elsewhere, the patient has to fork out a fortune for an operation at a private hospital. In Ipoh, for instance, a man who earns more than RM10,000 a month has the option of seeing one of the four interventional cardiologists in the private sector where the going rate for coronary angiography is RM4,000, angioplasty is RM8,000, angioplasty with stenting is about RM15,000, and by-pass surgery is in the region of RM30,000. Ten years ago that patient would have been sent to the cardiology units at the General Hospital, KL, the University Hospital or the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Now all have been corporatised, meaning: closed to those who are not government servants. Since Dr Mahathir adopted Thatcherism, medicine has become expensive. One of the first victims of this mean and unjust policy was the Women's and Children's Centre in Pulau Tikus which was closed down without an attendant reduction in rates and taxes. The government medical store has been privatized resulting in drugs costing more. So have government support services. Thatcherism encouraged the growth of private hospitals. Once upon a time, even the poorest patient had the chance of being seen by the senior specialists. Almost all the specialists were in government service. Now, 75 per cent of the specialists are in the private sector serving about the 25 per cent of the in-patient population. (Up till now 75 per cent of all admissions are still to government hospitals totalling 1,599,999). This situation has been made even worse with the corporatisation of the Cardiology Department of General Hospital, KL, as well as the corporatisation of the University hospitals. |
| The government now proposes a National
Health Financing Scheme, details of which are being worked out by
a mysterious foreign ‘expert' whose identity is being kept secret.
It is thought that a means test will be included in the plan. Society owes duty to give its children free education and free medical care. It is ridiculous to talk about expense. Poor and impoverished Cuba, despite merciless economic strangulation by the US, continues to provide free medical services. Benefits include medical, dental, and maternity care; prenatal and postnatal care; hospitalization; medicines during hospitalization; and rehabilitation. Benefits are provided until recovery. Cuba has a ratio of one doctor for every 170 Cubans, compared with 188 in the US and 250 in the UK. And pre-Deng Xiao Ping China provided medical care free and even invented the "bare foot" doctor to fill in the gaps. Cuba's medical services have recently been extended to helping its neighbours. In July 2005 it started on a humanitarian programme to restore the sight of six million people through free eye surgery, with financial help from Venezuela. We spent in year 2004 RM9 billions. It looks a large sum but it is only 2.3% of GDP. If we compare this with Britain's 9.8% and the USA's 14% the governmen'ts whining that we can't afford to continue the existing general hospital services sounds mean indeed. It is mean when you consider that RM2 billion will be spent on the so called Outer Ring Road which spent 30 years on the drawing boards in KL and which, with the inexorable outward creep of George Town, has made the PORR a joke. *** National flag carrier needed? RM60 MILLIONS for 20 consultants. A senior manager is paid RM 7,250 a day. Office renovation costs RM841,000 (a sum which includes kitchen equipment of RM33,515). RM1.55 millions is paid for three paintings. A few years ago we heard of fabulous prices paid to contractors for cabin crew shoes and first class meals. Nothing has changed except the scale of irresponsible extravagance. Some people are outraged. But heated discussion of MAS's expensive tastes is rather beside the point. Surely the question is: Do we need a national airline? The USA does not have one. In the fever of privatisation even the essential health services have been given away. But MAS is untouched. Everyone knows that it is kept in government hands - meaning we pay for the expensive toy - to feed our inferiority complex. If that isn't true, the finance ministry should set up a committee to examine whether the crippled national airline is viable or not. *** |
| Stripping women THE POLICE arrest a woman. She is ordered to strip. While naked, she does squats, holding her ear lobes, a punishment we inflicted on naughty children and slave girls (mui tsai) in the old days. Photo shots of the unfortunate woman were shown in Parliament. Everyone was shocked. Then came the explanations. The Deputy IGP said the punishment was standard procedure. An OCPD told the commission of inquiry set up to investigate that it was common procedure for the past 20 years. It was a long-held practice for female detainees to be ordered to perform ear squats in the nude, although not prescribed in the Inspector-General's Standing Orders, OCPD Standing Orders nor the Lock-up Rules. L/Cpl Wan Zawati Zalina Wan Ismail, the policewoman in the clip, told the commission that it didn't matter what alleged offences the detainees had committed. We have to pinch ourselves to be reminded that this is a country where the police are supposed to be aware of the principle of the presumption of innocence Let us be frank about ourselves. We are not a kind or generous country. Dr Tan Chee Khoon once blamed immigrants for KL's thefts and burglaries. And Dr Mahathir once said that we should shoot Vietnamese boat people if they tried to land. We are bad tempered like the surgeon who slapped a colleague in the operating theatre. We don't like foreigners - if they are not white. So we assume all Chinese women are prostitutes and lock them up without bothering to find out if they are China tourists. Indians are presumed ‘coolies' so we detained 195 Indian IT men in the middle of the night who are legitimately employed here. We are bullies. That this is so is demonstrated in the army, in schools and during raids on night spots when customers are treated like wicked criminals. (the extract "Detention" below makes painful reading). We are a violent and sometimes brutal people. We used to beat and torture ‘mui tsai'. We beat students. We beat and torture foreign maids. We even beat our babies to death. Even a VIP like Anwar Ibrahim was given a black eye that nearly killed him. And that was seven years ago. Peaceful demonstrators are treated like hardened criminals. We flog prisoners in the brutal British tradition until the bleeding flesh comes off with the cane. We hang convicted persons. And we shoot to kill - remember those five MIC men in a van who were shot dead without explanation, the judge at the inquiry commenting that the " Police were on a shooting spree." Then there is the refugee camp incident when some Aceh refugees who refused to be sent back to Soeharto Indonesia were shot dead. Are the police ashamed? Not one bit. Shortly after that sqaut expose, two wives, who had come with their foreign husbands to live here under the Malaya My Second Home programme, were locked up. The cops had decided that they must be illegal immigrant workers; they were not allowed to show their papers. A deputy minister swaggers in with: 'If the foreigners don't like it they can get out,' or words to that effect. A lawyer, who should know better, even says that the MP who showed the pictures in Parliament should be charged for ponorgraphy. Some senators even called for action to be taken against the MP 'for causing a public uproar by showing a video clip of a naked woman doing ear squats while in police custody.' |
In fact a Royal Commission to Enhance the Operation and Management of the Royal Malaysia Police, appointed before the present commission of inquiry, in its 433-page report found that intimate search and strip searches had not been done in strict accordance with prescribed regulations. The stripping and squatting was an infringement of human rights. The commission also observed that the police had no proper, standard guidelines on strip and intimate searches consonant with a modern human rights regime. It recommended an Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission with powers to receive and investigate complaints of police misconduct and to punish those found guilty. Stripping - Iraq style 
But did anyone care? We are still a feudal country. We suffer a police state and even reinforce it with titled secret society strongmen. Dostoyevsky said that the degree of civilization of a society can be measured by the treatment of its prisoners. We will begin to become civilized only when the opposition stops its worship of the Police State; they will signal its dismantling when they stop running to Papa Police to lodge reports against people they don't like, such as Dr Mahathir. By the way, why did the police not tell all instead of allowing the the minister to make a humiliating apology to China for the mistreatment of a "Chinese national'? # K L Chai |
| *Detention 'At around 12.55 am a group of about 50 people dressed in plain clothes entered the club. Some of them wore uniforms with the word Jawi on them. The officials then ordered the music to be turned off, and then segregated the crowd. Then, apparently, an announcement over the club's PA system instructed the non-Muslims to proceed to another part of the club 'to enjoy themselves' while the rest, about 100 Muslims, were told to form two separate groups, men and women.' (Sunday Mail, Jan 23). What happened next can only be described as dehumanising and degrading: Our fellow Malaysian citizens were ordered to crouch down on the ground, then herded together into a caged space in a lorry and then driven off to a detention centre at the Jawi headquarters. Some of those arrested claimed that the driver of the lorry drove recklessly, despite the screams of panic and fear of those locked in the cage. Once at the Jawi headquarters, the men and women were locked in cells, some of which were so small that 'they were forced to stand throughout their six to 10-hour ordeal.' To get a glimpse into the mindset of these so-called 'moral guardians', the testimonies of the victims are again relevant: 'The officers were only paying attention to the girls", according to some of those detained. The women were said to have been exposed to verbal abuse and humiliation, and some were even asked to 'twirl' around in front of the so-called 'moral guardians' so that the latter could get a better look at them, thus able to 'assess' if the girls were 'improperly dressed'. Among the highlights of the evening was one girl being forced to urinate in her clothes because she was denied access to the toilet; another girl asked to lower her handbag (which she used to cover her chest) so that the officials could have a better look at her nipples; and another female student being asked by the so-called 'moral guardians' if she had her genitals pierced.' *For an account of the arrest and detention of 'drug addicts' click on Drug Bust *Ong Boon Keong, a social activist, has described his arrest and detention in 2000 in Issue 7 Click on Issue No 7 |
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Jazz Letter from Pulau Tikus The nightmare A people's constitution (3)
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| _____________________ The Penang File Issue 44 |