LETTER | April 24, 2019 marks an important day for the healthcare landscape in Malaysia, for it is the day the cabinet turned down the request for general practitioners’ (GP) fees to be harmonised after 27 years of static GP fees.

Your friendly neighbourhood GPs who had been providing daily healthcare for decades to generations of Malaysian families at very reasonable and accessible costs had been surviving all this while with the low fees that have never been adjusted over a quarter of a century with gross profits from drug sales. In so doing, many Malaysians are able to see them easily, quickly and at affordable costs.

Despite this, many GPs are increasingly finding survival tough and many are struggling or on the verge of closing down.

The final nail on the coffin is, of course, cabinet’s approval of the drug price control proposal.

This signals the start of the possible annihilation of GP practice in this country, with no way to adsorb the rising costs of operating clinics that they can barely contain in the last 27 years.

A cup of coffee in the kopitiam 27 years ago cost 50 sen, and today it is RM2, representing a 400 percent increase. Yet, GP consultation fees have had a zero-percent increase. Maybe GPs don't need to drink coffee.

It is my prediction that GP practices will slowly and surely disappear, one by one, coaxed to their natural death by the ever-increasing and strangulating regulations that the government is hell-bent on implementing. That's the only aspect with true political willpower to act on.

In place of family GPs will be the nutritionist GPs specialising in nutrition; the supplementation GPs specialising in supplements and product distributions; the beauty GPs specialising in beauty and fashion, et cetera.

Fewer and fewer doctors will want to be family GPs, the bedrock of family health and primary care. Many doctors will clamour for specialisations and supersubspecialisation, as suggested by one CEO of a large private hospital recently.

What does this all mean to the average Malaysian? Well, it means that if you have a normal cough and cold or a bout of diarrhoea, you may have to go to the government health clinic and wait for hours and be seen for only a few minutes because the government health clinics are overburdened with hundreds of patients per day.

Alternatively, you would wait in the casualty area for the whole day to be seen, or of course, consult Mr Google and self medicate.

You may instead want to go to private facilities with specialists and supersubspecialists and end up with multiple investigations and procedures, because there are simply no GPs available to screen you and refer you to the appropriate specialists, or not go to specialists at all as it can be simply treated with simple medications.

I shudder to think of how healthcare will be in the very near future, with the government of the day knowingly or unknowingly dealing the final blow and leading to the eventual total elimination of decades of GP practice in this country.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.