Madam Speaker,
Thank you very much for allowing me to join this debate.
In 2006, shortly after I joined the Ministry of Health, I was asked in an interview what I thought people wanted from healthcare. I said that people wanted to "live long, live well and have peace of mind". I said that in the context of increasing longevity of our population. It is not a bad thing to have more years to live, provided those are years with quality and not years plagued with anxiety and debilitation. As for peace of mind, it is not only the individual's physical well-being but also whether he is confident that he has adequate provision for his healthcare expenditure and the impact of healthcare cost on his own as well as his family's finances.
How do we go about achieving that goal? In the Labour Movement, we have developed what is called the 4P approach which I will use to describe my thinking. The 4 Ps are: Protection, Progression, Placement and Privileges.
As applied to the subject at hand, I believe there should be 3 key pieces to work on. First, increase lifetime earnings through increasing the effective number of years a person is able to work and the wages he can sustainably earn in the course of his working life. This is Protection and Progression.
Second, provide better assurances of the adequacy of retirement resources to meet essential healthcare and living expenses while continuing to actively monitor and manage those rising costs that affect seniors most. This is Privilege.
Third, improve the opportunities and programmes for strengthening the physical, social and emotional dimensions of people's lives, especially as they age and then enter retirement. This will help secure their Place in society. I will elaborate on the third area during the COS for MOH under Active Ageing.
Madam Speaker, through a variety of efforts in these 3 areas, we pursue the ideal of Valuing every older employee at work, and every Senior in society. In a similar vein, my fellow Labour MPs will elaborate in their Budget debate speeches on how different segments of the workforce could and should be valued, protected and progressed.
It was against this backdrop of wanting to increase lifetime earnings that I advocated for the early implementation of legislated re-employment beyond the statutory retirement age of 62. I am happy that the tripartite partners agreed on this and Parliament passed the re-employment law in January 2011 to mandate re-employment from 62 to 65 years old. That law took effect from January 2012. At its most basic, this has enabled entire cohorts of seniors to continue to earn income for at least 3 more years.
The employment rate of workers in the (55 to 64) age bracket and even the (65 to 69) age bracket have further improved since 2012, both because of a tight labour market and also because older workers have proven their worth at work. With life expectancy continuing to rise, I firmly believe that the re-employment age ceiling need not and cannot stagnate at 65.
This was why I pushed last year for the re-employment age ceiling to be further raised in the next step from 65 to 67 once tripartite efforts have been focussed on consolidating the strengths of the legislated re-employment experience and come to terms with the measures that need to be put in place to enable that movement from 65 to 67. If I succeed in this, older workers will have the opportunity to earn income for at least 2 more years. I am glad that tripartite partners have now agreed to work on this issue, and I would continue to advocate for it to bear fruit as soon as possible.
As the aim is to enhance earned income sustainably, this is why besides enabling longer work lives, the Labour Movement has also pushed hard for the adoption of the Progressive Wage Model (PWM) across all sectors and workforce segments, and that includes tapping the full potential of the older workforce, as well as strengthening the CPF savings of older workers for Medisave and retirement through increased employer contributions. I am grateful for the tripartite support for these positions, and in particular want to thank the Government for the additional CPF contributions that it mandated in this year's Budget for all workers in Medisave, and especially for older workers in their Retirement accounts.
Another aspect to strengthen the Protection of older workers is through helping to upkeep their health and to make work more age-friendly. Programmes like WorkPro can offer incentives toward such outcomes. At the same time, workplace Health initiatives are also very important. For example, there are occupations that expose their workers to prolonged standing or sitting, or to repeated joint use. Over a long period, it hurts the health of workers as they age and harm their employability. We must drill down and zoom into initiatives that can help large groups of them maintain a level of health that can allow them to carry on contributing. I have therefore pushed for workplace health to go beyond the generalities to also focus on the occupations and industries with a concentration of older workers, to protect them against premature loss of employability and employment.
I now move on to the second critical piece of the jigsaw, which is on how to provide better assurances of the adequacy of retirement resources to meet essential healthcare and living expenses while continuing to actively monitor and manage those rising costs that affect seniors most.
Survey after survey of seniors reveal the same thing: that seniors are most worried about healthcare cost. This stems from 2 main reasons. First, many from the current generation of seniors did not have the chance to earn high wages in their younger days. It was a different economy and skills base then. Second, they know that the bulk of lifetime healthcare cost will be incurred around the final decade of life. This, together with seeing the reality of healthcare cost rises, leads to anxiety over the adequacy of personal resources to cope and the potential financial burden this could then become for the next generation.
While the 3M system of Medisave, Medishield and Medifund has served Singaporeans well over the decades, seniors remained concerned. In this regard, the Pioneer Generation Package announced in this Budget takes this bull by the horns and I applaud it.
The Pioneer Generation package builds on the Government's longstanding commitment to Singapoeans that no citizen will be denied necessary medical treatment on account of poverty. Through its iron-clad guarantees of super-enhanced SOC subsidies, lifelong annual Medisave top-ups and lifelong, inclusive and affordable MediShield Life coverage, the Government has addressed the financial concerns of Singaporeans who are 65 years or older this year about healthcare cost. Indirectly, this also alleviates the fears of their family members and helps them conserve money for other uses.
The financial peace of mind that the Pioneer Generation package accords is not only in the promised subsidies, but also in the upfront $8 billion ring-fenced commitment by Government. This places Singapore in a special class of countries which are not only willing to commit decisively and very substantially on a long-term basis, but has the resources to ensure that the promises are real and fully backed. We must thank decades of prudent stewardship of national resources that made this possible.
Going forward, I see 2 additional areas that we must pay attention to. The first is accord the post-Pioneer generation and employers with greater clarity over long term CPF savings rates. NTUC has urged tripartite partners to come together to further discuss the updating the 2003 set of long term rates. This is necessary as the current rates have been surpassed in many instances. As this subject has been widely covered in the media, I will not further elaborate on it today.
The second area is that of helping seniors in areas beyond healthcare expenditure. This year's Budget already contains examples in this area. For example, the new discounted Fare card for seniors will help older workers who have to travel frequently to lower transport expenditure. The special one-off Senior Bonus GST Voucher in this year's budget doubled the amount that older, lower- and middle-income seniors will receive compared to the normal GST voucher and will help with coping with cost of living. All these additional help and support rendered to seniors are much appreciated. At the same time, I note that the needs that these measures help address are also not one-off occurrences but are part and parcel of living in Singapore.
In terms of understanding needs, I find the Chinese saying 衣食住行医教 very useful. I suggest that the Government make a list of the various seniors-centric cash and cash-equivalent grants and subsidies it is giving. Perhaps divide them into healthcare-related and others. Healthcare to seniors is a big worry because of the fear of very big bills. But that does not happen all the time. The other categories tend to incur expenditures that are more recurrent and related to cost of living generally.
For the recurrent category, I suggest that the Government consider which of the grants and subsidies can be made permanent and/or enhanced. For example:
I continue to firmly believe in the importance of self-help and family support, and of ensuring fiscal prudence and sustainability. At the same time, I believe that there are still various ways to tweak and enhance existence schemes and programmes as well as to consider new ones to further strengthen the confidence and resilience of our senior population.
I urge Government to examine this area more closely, and see how such support can be further developed to take into account the recurrent nature of certain significant costs faced by our seniors. That would then reinforce our social safety net for our seniors, and add to ongoing efforts to partner our seniors to "live well and with greater peace of mind".
Madam Speaker, I support the Budget.
