Samy Vellu’s men might have swept the top posts in the MIC party elections, but the future of race-based politics and parties remains distinctly bleak. Leaving aside the lack of renewal in the party’s top leadership, the reality is that race-based parties are catering to a shrinking “market”, despite the best attempts of politicians to whip up ethnic sentiment. Thus, we now see attempts to use religion for political mileage. All this at great cost to unity.
Michael Moore’s must-see documentary, Sicko And then came the expose of a PR campaign by the private health care industry to discredit Moore’s documentary… I was reading the latest edition of The Edge – I am interested to see how the business folks think and what motivates them – when I came across a report that private hospitals are full because of the H1N1 alert. You would think that this would keep these private hospitals busy. But folks in the private hospital industry are actually worried – not because of the H1N1 outbreak – but because these flu patients do not bring high enough revenue yield! “Flu patients could occupy the beds for up to five to six days and yet make less money [for the hospitals] than those that come in for higher-yield procedures such as minor surgeries but who would only occupy the beds for about three days,” [Read more]
The IMF’s call for Malaysia to expedite a goods and services tax (GST) and slash subsidies is part of its larger – and now widely discredited – neo-liberal agenda. The IMF itself is struggling for relevance now as many developing countries especially in Latin America have shunned its advice after seeing the damage done to the national economies of that continent. The neo-liberal agenda, part of the “Washington Concensus”, is to cut taxes for the rich and the corporations, slash subsidies on social spending, and promote privatisation of essential services or “user-pay” models that benefit large corporations, including MNCs. The GST is a regressive tax that will hurt the poor, who are now outside the income tax bracket. If a tax on spending is introduced, the poor will bear a disproportionately higher tax burden (in terms of their spending compared to their income) than the rich.
It is disconcerting to see neoliberals in both Pakatan and the BN whole-heartedly welcoming Najib’s liberalisation of services. The DAP, MCA and Gerakan want liberalisation to be extended to other sectors; the MCA even mentioned national security and defence. No one is saying there shouldn’t be competition in certain sectors. But we are proceeding with liberalisation when some of the regulatory mechanisms are not in place. For instance, health care regulatory mechanisms to cover areas such as laboratory services that were promised a long time ago are not in place. What has happened to one of the biggest issues of them all – health care financing? The Coalition against Health Care Privatisation had demanded universal health care accessibility and greater allocations for the public health care system. If at all an insurance scheme was implemented, the coalition wanted it to be a universal national health insurance scheme.
Some 500 workers gathered this morning to observe Labour Day at Dataran Seremban. This year’s theme is ‘Economic crisis: Save the workers, not the cronies’. Civil society and workers groups are demanding: a retrenchment fund with an initial contribution of RM0.5 billion from the government, a stimulus package that really provides jobs for unemployed Malaysians, discussions with banks to reschedule and reduce monthly housing loan replayments for low-income workers,