Body Politics

My second daughter was born three weeks ago. When the day came to bring her home from the very decent private hospital where she was delivered—with its thick room-service menu, satellite TV and maids on call—I remember climbing into the taxi, being transported down Peak Road and giving thanks that we were not dependent on Hong Kong’s public health system. Somewhere in the mephitic smog that wreathed the city below, the aged and infirm were waiting hours for a doctor, and the dying were breathing their last in crammed, fluorescent-lit wards. But that wasn’t us. That was other people.
It was other people that I was thinking about yesterday, while reading the reports of the annual policy address made by Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Donald Tsang. With the city’s fiscal reserves standing at over $50bn, he has decided to make it easier for the elderly to use private healthcare—by offering them an allowance of $32.24 per head, per year. That is, people over 70 are to receive five vouchers a year, each with a face value of $6.44, to use at private clinics or dental practices. It is a gesture of startling meanness, particularly when you consider that in the same address, Tsang made tax and rate concessions to the wealthy and the middle class amounting to almost $1bn.
The sum of $32.24, to give you an idea, wouldn’t even buy you lunch in a Hong Kong private hospital. It barely buys you a jar of vitamin supplements at the pharmacy. It might get you into a doctor’s waiting room in one of the shabbier districts, but it probably wouldn’t cover any medicine prescribed. And it wouldn’t buy you a nanosecond of my dentist’s time. A few hits of methadone are probably all the vouchers are good for, and there are plenty of senior junkies who would be glad of it, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. (The oldsters who don’t need them can sell them at a mark-up to the ones jonesing at the rehab clinic gates.)
“I’m 63 myself,” Tsang said in the Legislative Council yesterday. “How can I not have the elderly in my heart?” He probably thought he was asking a rhetorical question, but it deserves a literal answer.