During Chinese New Year, somewhere between the third serving of bak kwa and the late-night pineapple tarts, I found myself doing what many of us quietly do after festive indulgence, negotiating with the future.
“Maybe I should just try Ozempic.”
The thought was half-serious. The festive belly always feels temporary, but age has a way of making temporary things linger. Ozempic, the diabetes medication that has become synonymous with weight loss, is undeniably effective. It suppresses appetite. It improves metabolic control. For many, it works.
But as I sat there contemplating a pharmaceutical shortcut to festive excess, something felt incomplete.
Ozempic can reduce weight. It does not redesign food culture. It does not shorten buffet tables at open houses. It does not replace long-term discipline in diet and movement. It treats the manifestation, not the environment that produces it.
And that was when it struck me.
The current debate over medical insurance limits feels strikingly similar.
When Base MHIT was introduced, one of the first questions raised was whether RM100,000 is sufficient. Some agents quickly argued that RM1 million, RM5 million limits, or even unlimited coverage, remain the only truly safe option.
The instinct is understandable. Medical bills have been rising sharply. No family wants to confront a ceiling during a medical crisis.
But adjusting limits alone resembles reaching for Ozempic after festive overindulgence. It may ease immediate anxiety. It may strengthen financial protection. Yet it does not change the structural forces driving healthcare inflation in the first place.
The ongoing episode of healthcare inflation did not emerge because limits were too low. It is unfolding within a system shaped by deeper transitions.
Malaysia is living through a sustained rise in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) diabetes, which I've covered in another piece.
Non-communicable diseases are not episodic illnesses. They are chronic trajectories. They require monitoring, imaging, medication adjustments, procedures, and sometimes complications that surface years later.
An admission Is rarely an isolated event. It is often one chapter in a longer clinical story.
At the same time, the way care is financed shapes behaviour. Fee-for-service arrangements reward volume. Defensive medicine increases diagnostic intensity. Technology diffuses faster than payment discipline evolves. When consumers are understandably insulated from price signals, utilisation expands with limited counterweights.
None of this is dramatic. Much of it is rational behaviour within the incentives we have built.
Which is why simply raising insurance limits does not, by itself, bend the cost curve.
If the system’s incentives remain unchanged, additional financing flows into the same architecture. Protection increases. Inflationary pressure remains.
This is where the government's RESET startegy matters.
The RESET strategy is not about reducing protection. It is about recalibrating incentives, and in the present circumstances, that recalibration is the work that demands our focus.
Payment reforms such as Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRGs) shift reimbursement away from pure volume. Network discipline attempts to anchor prices within negotiated parameters. Standardised benefit design creates clearer reference points. Calibrated co-payment structures reintroduce a degree of cost awareness without abandoning protection.
These are not peripheral adjustments. They go to the core of how costs are generated.
Reform capacity, however, is not infinite. Systems cannot absorb every structural transformation at once. Payment reform, financing reform, and behavioural transformation each require institutional focus, regulatory bandwidth, and political capital.
In the current circumstances, the RESET strategy represents the most immediate lever available to influence cost dynamics at their source.
Attempting to pursue every reform simultaneously risks diffusing energy and blurring accountability. If inflation is being driven by incentive structures, then realigning those incentives must take priority.
Beyond the RESET strategy and financing reforms lies the most fundamental, but also slowest, layer of change: the population’s health behaviour.
Reducing the prevalence and impact of non-communicable diseases, improving diet, increasing physical activity, quitting smoking, managing stress, and detecting disease early, is not something that can be mandated or funded overnight. It is a generational challenge. It requires coordinated efforts across education, urban planning, workplace wellness, food systems, public awareness, and primary care.
These interventions are difficult to implement, slow to bear fruit, and often intangible in the short term. Yet they are the cornerstone of sustainable cost containment. Without healthier behaviours at scale, even perfectly structured financing and payment reforms will face relentless pressure from rising disease burden.
In that sense, the RESET strategy addresses what can be influenced today. Behavioural transformation addresses what must be cultivated over decades. The two are complementary. One stabilises the system; the other gradually reduces the pressures that drive its costs upward. Sequencing matters: without a strong RESET foundation, attempts at sweeping behavioural reforms may struggle to gain traction or demonstrate impact.
In that layered journey, Base MHIT occupies a specific role.
It is not the structural recalibration. It is not the generational transformation. It is a structured financing floor introduced while those larger adjustments are underway.
It can improve predictability. It can widen access to a defined baseline of protection. It can create reference discipline in product design.
But it cannot, by design, neutralise healthcare inflation on its own. It is a crucial building block within the RESET strategy.
When I thought about Ozempic during Chinese New Year, it was not because I doubted its effectiveness. It was because I recognised its limits.
It can manage weight. It does not reshape habits.
Expanding insurance limits can manage bill shock. It does not reshape incentives.
If we confuse financing expansion with structural reform, we risk building a system that is better funded, yet fundamentally unchanged.
The debate, then, is not simply whether RM100,000 is enough, or whether RM5 million feels safer.
The deeper question is whether we are prepared to address the forces driving the bill itself.
Teck Jin Wong (wteckjin90@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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