KUALA LUMPUR (June 24): The Health Ministry should be given powers to regulate private hospital charges as one of the measures to address rising healthcare costs, a parliamentary committee said.
Such a move would require an amendment to the Private Healthcare Facilities and Services Act that only covers doctors’ fees on consultation and procedures, according to a report released on Wednesday by the bipartisan Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
Non-professional charges — supplies, equipment, medicines, laboratory tests, and advanced technology — are currently not subject to any regulation and have been identified as a key driver of rising healthcare costs in the report.
The committee also recommended that the Health Ministry, in cooperation with the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Cost of Living, establish price control mechanisms for medicines and medical equipment to ensure prices “remain reasonable and prevent excessive profiteering”.
The recommendations follow the committee’s findings that the absence of a standardised private hospital billing structure currently prevents the true costs of services and basic items from being transparently reflected.
“The issue of high medicine prices is often used as a tool to cover other operational costs that are not directly charged, such as nursing and utility costs,” the committee noted.
The failure of the law also known as Act 586 passed in 1998 “to evolve with the times” has allowed hospitals to impose “creative charges that are legally permissible but impose moral and economic burdens on the public”, the committee flagged.
One such example it highlighted was that some hospitals practised “unbundling charges” or imposed separate charges for basic items such as clinical waste disposal, pillowcases and alcohol swabs, which should have been included under room or basic service charges.
The committee also found a practice of price discrimination in the industry whereby hospitals imposed higher charges on patients using a guarantee letter compared to patients paying cash or using a pay-and-claim arrangement.
The government has also been urged to expedite the implementation of the diagnosis-related group payment system in the private healthcare sector and to fully roll out reform initiatives under the ‘Reset framework’ to help control treatment costs and insurance premiums over the long term.
The Reset framework comprises a revamp of medical and health insurance, enhancement to price transparency, transition towards a nationwide integrated electronic medical records platform, and expanding cost-effective care options.
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