【正文】
and even if the heart specialist is available to be called upon for assistance, will he negotiate and requests for a mitment on payment of his fees first? I can go on and on with litanies of situations fraught with conflicts of interest between bottom line profit concerns and the ethical values of the Hippocratic oath. The question for physicians and the medical profession to answer is. ?How do you balance and reconcile these conflicting imperatives?‘ And the question for the government to answer is, ?What are you doing in terms of public health care to provide cheaper and more alternatives for those of us who are plain disillusioned with private hospitals and their sickening maximisation of profits?‘ At this moment, we have to wait (say) five hours in a government hospital for a blood test to determine if our condition is serious enough to be warded, then join a queue of 400 persons waiting in line for dispensation of medicine and wait up to four months for the earliest available date for surgery. 。 policies on charges and billings including ―No money no treatment‖ or ―No money no body‖ laid down from above by their directors who may not all be physicians and, if publiclisted, have to further account to faceless shareholders to whom profits and share prices should go up for every successive financial year. Hence patients may be required to pay RM10 for toilet rolls, not to mention thousands of ringgit for surgery or stay in a deluxe room for convalescence. Fast registration, fourstar private rooms for recuperation, televisions and toilet rolls are fine but they