A decade ago, I had an experience that left me profoundly grateful to Singapore’s healthcare system. During a work trip to the island state, I was suddenly taken ill and succumbed to a rare variety of meningitis. In many countries, I would have died but two extraordinary things occurred. First, a work colleague had a strange premonition that something was wrong and came to my hotel room, where she found me sliding into a coma. Second, the colleague then had me rushed to a local hospital, where Singaporean doctors identified the problem with astonishing efficiency and then took a bold medical gamble to save my life. (Essentially, they injected every type of antibiotic they possessed directly into my heart because they did not have any tailored way of treating the rare strain of meningitis I had.)
When that risky gamble pulled me out of the coma, the hospital staff set me on the long path to rehabilitation, with further efficiency and grace. And, a few months later, came another surprise. When I stumbled on some of the paperwork between the hospital and my insurance group, I noticed that the bill for the intervention was not that large. “If this had happened in America, it would be many times that size,” a colleague later grimly remarked in New York. (To which I retorted that if the incident had happened in America, I might not have survived at all since litigation risk might have deterred the doctors from engaging in that antibiotic gamble.)
Was this just a piece of random good luck? Yes, in part. But in recent weeks I have been flicking through a fascinating ebook, Affordable Excellence, that an American scientist friend, William Haseltine, has written about Singaporean medicine for the Brookings Institution. And this leaves me convinced that I have even more reasons to say “thank you” to Singapore than I realised at the time. For if Haseltine is correct, Singapore’s healthcare system is not just low cost but also very effective in terms of saving lives – both during emergencies and in less dramatic cases too. Indeed, the success is so striking that it might offer lessons elsewhere, particularly in America, which is now embarking on its own radical health reforms via Obamacare.