Qualification Criteria for Community Health Assist Scheme

Mdm Speaker, from 1 January 2014, the qualifying age for the Community Health Assist Scheme (CHAS) will be removed. This will allow Singaporeans of all ages in lower and middle income households to access subsidised care at private General Practitioner (GP) clinics and dental clinics near their homes.

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For existing Health Assist cardholders who have family members in their household who are 40 years and below, we will automatically include their family members into the scheme with effect from 1January 2014. They will receive their Health Assist cards from 26 December 2013 onwards.

For younger households who only meet the revised criteria now, they can already start to apply for the scheme now and each household will only need to submit one application form, which is available at the Restructured Hospitals, Polyclinics, Community Centres and Clubs (CCs) or Community Development Councils (CDCs) and they can also download the forms from the CHAS website. We will also work with grassroots organisations to reach out to needy households in the community to help them apply for the scheme.

I thank the Minister for making the process so seamless. The Singaporean families, especially those who already qualified for the CHAS card, would greatly benefit from the streamlined process. I have a supplementary question for the Minister. If a CHAS eligible household suffers a drop in the household income within the two-year validity period – say from $1,500 to $900 per capita household monthly income either because of loss of employment or due to changes in household members' employment – would the Minister consider upgrading the CHAS subsidy level from orange to blue?

The answer is yes. Please apply and we will review on a case-by-case basis. If the income has indeed dropped, we will give you an upgrade to the blue card. The idea is that this card eventually aims to help the low-income and the middle income and if you need help, we will try our best to help.

I would like to ask the Minister, with these changes, does the Ministry expect more private GPs and clinics to come on board the scheme? And what would Ministry be doing to encourage more to join the scheme?

Mdm Speaker, we are already progressively seeing more and more GPs signing on and we want to continue to reach out to them. In fact, through our Agency for Integrated Care (AIC), we have been engaging the private GPs to explain to them what the scheme is about and how they can benefit from this scheme as well as help us to reach out and benefit the needy patients. More and more GPs and dental clinics are coming on board. We will continue to step up our efforts to reach out to them to encourage them to sign

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up.

Mdm Speaker, can I just ask the Minister: for clinics that are displaying the CHAS logo, both dental and medical clinics, are there only specific procedures that are applicable to CHAS subsidy? I have got lots of residents who are now coming forward to say that when they go for certain procedures, they are told that these are not covered under CHAS.

First, let me explain the CHAS was conceptualised primarily to take care of chronic diseases. Therefore, if we are going to see the GPs for chronic diseases which are covered under the Chronic Disease Management Programme (CDMP), treatment for the diseases would be covered by CHAS. Other conditions will not be included, but we also cover outpatient acute conditions for the blue card as well.

For the CDMP, we recently announced that we are going to expand the list from 10 conditions to 15 conditions. We will continue to review whether there is a need to further expand the CDMP as we go on and as we gain more experience with the five new diseases.