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Tag: Paul Ananth Thambyah

  • Meet SDP’s Paul Anantharajah Tambyah

    Meet SDP’s Paul Anantharajah Tambyah

    It is parliamentary election season in Singapore now and there are several firsts this round. The most significant to me personally are that I will finally get a chance to vote, and that there is an infectious diseases physician contesting this time as a candidate for theSingapore Democratic Party (SDP), one of the older opposition political parties in Singapore.

    Professor Paul Tambyah is famous in medical and healthcare circles, although perhaps less well known to the man or woman in the street. He was the founding head of infectious diseases at the National University Hospital, and has won more awardsthan I can count. He is regularly invited to give lectures at international conferences, and sits on a huge number of ministry (not just MOH) committees, lending his insights and experience to improve Singapore.

    I have the privilege of working under, and then with him, for a good number of years on both medical and other matters. His intelligence is quite evident, and is combined with great energy and a deep sense of integrity. Less well known is his compassion, which I have witnessed exhibited to medical students and patients. Unlike many others, he still maintains a faith in Singapore, and a willingness to freely contribute his time and energy to Singapore that is striking. There is no profit – personal or otherwise – that comes from being associated with the opposition in Singapore, as many locals know.

    He had kindly agreed to answer some questions for this blog, taking time out of his hectic campaign schedule (I guess we will find out if he will command as many “eyeballs” as Group B streptococcus and raw fish!). I have copied his email answers below:

    • 1. Why did you – a prominent infectious diseases clinician, tenured professor of medicine, well-respected researcher, and a happily married man – decide to get involved in politics in Singapore?

    The main reason was the frustration with the healthcare financing system in place in our public hospitals. Many doctors and nurses feel the same. I have tried all the conventional approaches including speaking up at various feedback sessions etc. but to no avail. Eventually I realised that the only way to get answers on important questions is to get into parliament. One of my heroes Rudolf Virchow did the same – and he was contending withBismarck the Iron Chancellor!

    • 2. Many of your colleagues are concerned about your being in an opposition party. That you may suffer job repercussions, loss of career opportunities, and not be awarded further research grants post GE-2015. What do you say to that?

    I think that question was definitively answered when I was promoted to full professor with tenure in 2013 after “coming out” at the SDP boat quay rally in 2011. The knuckleduster era is truly over and Singapore politics is fortunately entering what was called the “new normal”

    • 3. How did you persuade your wife and family to let you campaign?

    It was hard. They were very worried about repercussions – my parents knew Dr. Lim Hock Siew and Dr. Beatrice Chen very well and obviously 20 years of detention without trial was a scary spectre.
    I think that the realisation that with social media, those kinds of things will never happen again hopefully helped reassure them. My wife knows that she cannot change my mind once my mind is made up :-) .

    • 4. Is it safe for your medical or infectious diseases colleagues to be seen drinking tea with you from now until mid-September? Lightning seems drawn to those who wear red, it is said…

    Hopefully not any more. Many doctors and nurses have been spotted at rallies and so far, all are well!

    • 5. What 3 things do your medical colleagues not know about you?

    1) that I have a second edition of Osler’s Principles and Practices of Medicine from around 1900.

    2) that I cannot drink coffee after 3pm.

    3) that I was once one of the editors of Sintercom – the Singapore Internet Community (that was) shut down before the 2001 elections.

    • 6. What is your favourite hawker food and is it really healthy to eat orh luak (what are the risks of hepatitis or food poisoning)?

    There are significant norovirus and Vibrio risks from any oyster dish. I like nasi briyani done local style with pineapple salad

    • 7. Why should people vote for someone like you – who hails from another ivory tower (i.e. university)?

    I like to think that my general medicine duties bring me back down to “the ground”. My mother’s favourite quotation is from Proverbs 31 where she talks about being the “voice of the voiceless” in speaking up for the marginalised who are often sidelined. I hope that I can be part of that voice in Parliament.

    Source: MIPHIDIC – Personal infectious diseases blog, focusing in particular on Singapore, antimicrobial resistance, outbreaks, and (occasionally) chess.

     

    Source: www.tremeritus.com

  • SDP: Vivian Balakrishnan Should Examine PAP’s Own Policies

    SDP: Vivian Balakrishnan Should Examine PAP’s Own Policies

    Dr Chee Soon Juan transcript:

    Dr Vivian Balakrishnan characterised the SDP’s alternative policies as one of “tax and spend” and that they will lead the country to bankruptcy. He did not, however, cite any specific policy but merely said that the SDP had copied policies from “other parts of the world”.

    Dr Balakrishnan should be looking at his own party’s record on such practices.

    Experts cite the low interest rates of the CPF (even though the government claims its ROI is high) as an implicit tax. In addition, the slew of taxes, fees, and levies open up for the PAP government large streams of revenue.

    All this has resulted in our large reserves which are handled by the GIC and Temasek Holdings. In 2008, the two sovereign wealth funds admitted that thay had lost between $120 billion to $140 billion in failed investments in Western banks such as Merril Lynch, Citigroup and UBS.

    If it had not been for the intervention of the US government in the form of bailout out money under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), these banks would have collapsed, and our reserves would have been irretrievably lost.

    Given such a record, Dr Balakrishnan should be looking at his own party’s track record when he talks about policies of tax and spend.

    On a related noted, the criticism from Dr Balakrishnan is reminiscent of the one he made in the 2011 GE about the SDP’s proposal to raise taxes for top earners (those in the top 1 percent) closer to the 30-percent mark.

    He said then: “If you had to choose between the opposition parties who would be the most middle-class unfriendly of them, (the SDP) would certainly be in that shortlist.”

    In 2015, however, Finance Minister Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that the Government would raise taxes for the top 5 percent earners. It seems that Mr Tharman did exactly what Dr Balakrishnan attacked the SDP for.

    This is not the only instance that the PAP has at first criticised the SDP ideas only to adopt them later. Other examples are:

    Minimum wage
    SDP proposes: Minimum wage in 2001.
    PAP criticises: Minister Lim Swee Say criticises that Minimum Wage will erode Singapore’s competitiveness.
    PAP copies: Government introduces the Progressive Wage Model where some low-income workers are paid a minimum wage of $1,000.

    Universal healthcare
    SDP proposes: Individual healthcare risks are pooled.
    PAP criticises: Mr Lee Kuan Yew said: “…nobody derails the idea of having individual accounts for CPF and Medisave. Whatever you earn, it’s yours.”
    PAP copies: Medishield Life now says that “everyone shares in the national risk pool”.

    Singaporeans first policy
    SDP proposes: Employers must try to hire Singaporeans first before considering employing foreigners.
    PAP criticises: Senior Minister of State Amy Khor said that such a policy will not work.
    PAP copies: MOM introduced the Fair Compensation Framework which “require employers to consider Singaporeans fairly before hiring Employment Pass holders.”

     

    Dr Paul Ananth Tambyah transcript:
    Minister Vivian Balakrishnan made some rather perplexing statements yesterday

    http://www.straitstimes.com/politics/ge2015-sdp-policies-will-set-spore-on-the-road-to-greece-says-vivian-balakrishnan
    First of all, he alleged that the SDP had copied policy prescriptions that had failed elsewhere. He does not provide any evidence to support these assertions and in fact, his assertion contradicts the World Health Organization which ranked the French Healthcare system which is probably closest to the SDP’s National Healthcare Plan as the best performing healthcare system in the world (http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf). The SDP healthcare system is benchmarked against the best healthcare systems in the world unlike the Greek social support system which has ignored the advice of international experts.

    Second, according to the ST report, he selectively attacks parts of the SDP economic policy specifically raising taxes on the top earners and increasing social spending. Oddly enough, those are precisely the features of the 2015 budget proposed by Finance Minister Tharman (http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/singapore-budget-2015-personal-income-tax-for-top-5-of-earners-to-be-raised-says-tharman). I do not think that Minister Balakrishnan seriously believes that Minister Tharman is setting Singapore on the road to Greece. The SDP economic policy goes further than Minister Tharman’s budget proposals which we welcome – we also advocate a minimum wage, retrenchment insurance, and increasing transparency and accountability in social services including housing and healthcare.

    Finally, it appears that the Minister has an incomplete understanding of the Greek crisis. The Greeks actually spend below the OECD average on healthcare (http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Briefing-Note-GREECE-2014.pdf) and have levels of social spending far below the Nordic countries or even Germany. The reason for the Greek crisis is thought to be primarily a profligate approach to spending. This is quite different from the SDP proposals which are well thought out and balanced. We do not believe in uncontrolled overspending. In order to implement our policies, we need to be elected to parliament so as to help make those policies a reality for the good of Singaporeans.

     

    Source: http://yoursdp.org