The following originally appeared on The Upshot (copyright 2017, The New York Times Company) and is jointly authored by Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt.
Singapore’s health care system is distinctive, and not just because of the improbability that it’s admired by many on both the American left and the right.
It spends less of its economy on health care than any country that was included in our recent tournament on best health systems in the world.
And it spends far, far less than the United States does. Yet it achieves some outcomes Americans would find remarkable. Life expectancy at birth is two to three years longer than in Britain or the United States. Its infant mortality rate is among the lowest in the world, about half that of the United States, and just over half that of Britain, Australia, Canada and France. General mortality rates are impressive compared with pretty much all other countries as well.
When the World Health Organization ranked health care systems in 2000, it placed the United States 37th in quality; Singapore ranked sixth.
Americans tend to think that they have a highly privatized health system, but Singapore is arguably much more so. There, about two-thirds of health care spending is private, and about one-third is public. It’s just about the opposite in the United States.
Singapore’s health system also has a mix of public and private health care delivery organizations. There are private and public hospitals, as well as a number of tiers of care. There are five classes: A, B1, B2+, B2 and C. “A” gets you a private room, your own bathroom, air-conditioning and your choice of doctor. “C” gets you an open ward with seven or eight other patients, a shared bathroom and whatever doctor is assigned to you.
But choosing “A” means you pay for it all. Choosing “C” means the government pays up to 80 percent of the costs.
What also sets Singapore apart, and what makes it beloved among many conservative policy analysts, is its reliance on health savings accounts. All workers are mandated to put a decent percentage of their earnings into savings for the future. Workers up to age 55 have to put 20 percent of their wages into these accounts, matched by an additional 17 percent of wages from their employer. After age 55, these percentages go down.
The money is divided among three types of accounts. There’s an Ordinary Account, to be used for housing, insurance against death and disability, or for investment or education. There’s a Special Account, for old age and investment in retirement-related financial products. And there’s a Medisave Account, to be used for health care expenses and approved medical insurance.
The contribution to Medisave is about 8 percent to 10.5 percent of wages, depending on your age. It earns interest, set by the government. And it has a maximum cap, around $52,000, at which point you’d divert the mandatory savings into some other account.
A second health care program is Medishield Life. This is for catastrophic illness, and while it’s not mandatory, almost all of the population is covered by it. It’s really cheap, from $16 a month for a 29-year-old in 2019 to $68 a month for a 69-year-old, without subsidies.
Medishield Life kicks in when you’ve paid the deductibles for the year, and after you’ve paid your coinsurance. Deductibles vary by your age and the class of care you choose, and range from $1,500 to $3,000. Coinsuranceranges from 3 percent to 20 percent, varying by the size of the medical bill. Medishield Life has an annual limit of $100,000 but no lifetime limit.
Medishield Life is managed so that it covers most of a hospitalization in a Class B2 or C ward. Patients would cover the rest out of their Medisave accounts. Patients also have the option to pay for additional insurance, which would cover a higher class of care. Some plans are offered by the government, and people can use Medisave money to pay for those. Other plans are purely private, and sometimes offered by employers as benefits.
A third health care program is Medifund, which is Singapore’s safety net program. Only citizens are eligible; it covers only the lowest class of wards; and it’s available only after people have depleted their Medisave account and Medishield Life coverage. The amount of help someone could get from Medifund depends on a patient’s and family’s income, condition, expenses and social circumstances. Decisions are made at a very local level.
A number of people hold up Singapore as an example of how conservative ideas of competition and consumer-directed spending work. Unfortunately, the story isn’t so clean when you look at the data. In a 1995 paper in Health Affairs, William Hsiao looked at how health spending fared in Singapore before and after the introduction of Medisave. He found that health care spending increased after the introduction of increased cost-sharing, which is not what most proponents of such changes would expect. Michael Barr had similar thoughts in his “critical inquiry” into Singapore’s medical savings account, published in The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law in 2001.
But why is Singapore so cheap? Some think that it’s the strong use of health savings accounts and cost-sharing. People who have to use their own money usually spend less. But that’s not the whole story here. There’s a lot of government regulation as well.
Through the tiered care system and its public hospitals, the government has a great deal of control over inpatient care. It allows a private system to challenge the public one, but the public system plays the dominant role in providing services.
Initially, Singapore let hospitals compete more, believing that the free market would bring down costs. But when hospitals competed, they did so by buying new technology, offering expensive services, paying more for doctors, decreasing services to lower-class wards, and focusing more on A-class wards. This led to increased spending.
In other words, Singapore discovered that, as we’ve seen many times before, the market sometimes fails in health care. When that happened in Singapore, government officials got more involved. They established the proportion of each type of ward hospitals had to provide, they kept them from focusing too much on profits, and they required approval to buy new, expensive technology.
Singapore heavily regulates the number of physicians, and it has some control over salaries as well. The country uses bulk purchasing power to spend less on drugs.
The most frustrating part about Singapore is that, as an example, it’s easily misused by those who want to see their own health care systems change. Conservatives will point to the Medisave accounts and the emphasis on individual contributions, but ignore the heavy government involvement and regulation. Liberals will point to the public’s ability to hold down costs and achieve quality, but ignore the class system or the system’s reliance on individual decision-making.
Singapore is also very small, and the population may be healthier in general than in some other countries. It’s a little easier to run a health care system like that. It also makes the system easier to change. We should also note that some question the outcomes on quality, or feel that the government isn’t as honest about the system’s functioning.
There is a big doctor shortage, as well as a shortage of hospital beds. As Mr. Barr noted in a longer discussion of Singapore’s system, “It seems to be highly likely that if one could examine the Singapore health system from the inside, one would find a fairly ordinary health system with some strong points and many weaknesses — much like health systems all over the developed world.” This concern about how much we can really know about Singapore’s true outcomes is one of the reasons it didn’t fare so well in our contest.
