For us, it was an expensive resolution to an unexpected predicament. Luckily, we didn’t had to bear the blunt of it.
My dad has always been built like a bull — he is rarely sick, and the only time he got hospitalized was when he was robbed when I was 3 years old.
Then one day recently, he hurt his back. The strain and pain resulting was so intrusive that he had to take time off work to recuperate.
We visited Western general practitioners and Chinese physicians alike, but they couldn’t solve the problem. Everyday, my dad would be at home, crippled by a sense of ache in his left leg that is only slightly alleviated by lying down in a particular manner.
By the advice of my mother’s friend, we finally visited a Neuro-Spine specialist at Mount Elizabeth. The MRI diagnostic costs us $730, but it was definite and conclusive — the general discomfort was a result of some… muscular disc that was exerting pressure on the nerves along his spine, and my dad needed a surgery to fix it.
The specialist could have done it at $35,000, but it was beyond us. So we had it performed at Singapore General Hospital, which costs half the price.
It was the first time our family had to deal with a surgery and hospitalization, so naturally we were quite unnerved.
Fortunately, it went well - the surgeon scraped off parts of the disc and inserted a piece of titanium to correct the spine. The very next day, my dad could walk normally again.
This whole episode had the bill of $15,000. It is a big sum by our books, and would mean a big disruption to our finances had we had to pay it out of our own pockets. Thankfully, my mom in her work was covered by the company’s insurance and that included her spouse. So that took the impact of the $15,000, and brought a relieving conclusion to the whole story.
The take-away from this ordeal?
That we can be feeling well one day and be struck suddenly by a crippling illness another day. It can be curable in a single surgery, or it may take weeks of diagnostics and treatment to fix, but it certainly will cost a bomb.
Are your family prepared to withstand such an impact? And even if you do, what does $15,000 mean to you? Would you be able to produce it without feeling the pinch?
A lot of us take our good health for granted, and refuse to consider worst case scenarios such as this. And when it finally hits, we scramble to reduce the damage but it may be all too late.
In a way, it is, for my parents. They were never the strongest proponents of insurance, but after this incident they find themselves struggling to be insured.
Insurance works in a very logical manner - when you are young and well, it is cheap and it covers everything. When you are old and suffering from ailments, the premiums are expensive and the insurance companies, even if they are willing to insure you, will exclude all the ailments that you ever had.
Everyone, every single one of us, in my opinion, should be covered under the Medishield Extra/Plus at the very least - which ensures that you will never have to pay for a single cent if you are hospitalized.
Do not take the good health you have today, for something that’ll never go away.
