Thank you, President. I would like to thank Ms CHAN Hoi-yan for proposing today’s motion and other members for moving amendments, which allow us to discuss this issue.
Hong Kong is facing an ageing population, which has brought about heavy healthcare burdens. Health expenditures increased from about HK$87.6 billion in 2020-2021 to HK$109.5 billion in 2024-2025. The Government estimated earlier that the fiscal deficit for this year would be under HK$100 billion. We should take this opportunity to review revenues and expenditures, and be determined to reform the healthcare system, reorganize resources, strike a balance between protecting people’s livelihood and finance, and ensure that relevant policies are sustainable for long-term implementation.
As with other government services, streamlining procedures, enhancing efficiency, reducing waste and eliminating abuse can significantly reduce expenditures. It is often reported that the elderly and chronically ill patients have accumulated large quantities of various medicines at home, which are eventually discarded. This is one of the issues to be addressed seriously. In addition, there are views that hospital beds have a low turnover rate under the current healthcare system. It is currently the winter peak service period. Since 21 December last year, the medical inpatient bed occupancy rate of public hospitals at midnight has generally reached 100%, and even 131% at individual hospitals, indicating that hospital beds are severely overcrowded and healthcare resources are under immense pressure.
It is suggested that the authorities should think deeply and take effective measures to improve the bed turnover rate, reduce unreasonable bed occupation, and allocate healthcare resources more effectively. The authorities can refer to international standards, formulate scientific and reasonable bed usage standards, optimize bed management mechanisms, and speed up the bed turnover rate. Secondly, the authorities should speed up the discharge process of patients and arrange timely discharge of patients who meet the discharge conditions, or make referrals as needed to avoid long-term occupancy of beds. By improving the efficiency of healthcare services, we can serve more people using identical resources, rather than blindly building hospitals, and we can better pool resources together to meet people’s needs.
In addition, in terms of revenues, the current public healthcare system’s charging standards are generally low. For example, each accident and emergency department patient, the operating cost amounts to $2,400 but the actual charge is only $180. Moreover, the average cost of hospitalization is more than $7,000 per day but the daily charge (for general beds) is only $120. It is clear that the charges do not reflect the cost and value of healthcare services. At present, the public healthcare system has improved its mechanism to reduce or exempt the charges for the disadvantaged such as CSSA recipients, elderly recipients of Old Age Living Allowance and low-income people. Therefore, people with financial difficulties have been fully protected.
It is suggested that the public healthcare charges be suitably increased by referring to the charging standards of private clinics while ensuring that they are still within the range that is affordable to the public. Through price adjustments, the Government’s healthcare burden can be reduced, and some non-urgent and non-critical patients can seek services in the private market, thereby freeing up resources in the public healthcare system, allowing the public healthcare system to focus more on providing high-quality services to seriously ill patients, optimizing the allocation of healthcare resources, and improving the overall efficiency and quality of healthcare services, and providing people with fairer and more efficient healthcare protection.
Faced with huge healthcare expenditures, the Government should effectively allocate and utilize healthcare resources and comprehensively review the existing healthcare expenditure structure to meet the society’s growing demand for healthcare services and provide more people with better quality and more efficient healthcare services. We must rationally control healthcare costs to avoid placing excessive pressure on public finances.
Thank you, President.