Sunday, April 29, 2012

CPF schemes are NEVER well conceived.

At last someone prominent has spoken up about Eldershield plan, which is suppose to take of the medical cost should we become an invalid. Prof Phua K H said that the scheme is completely inadequate. We the ordinary folks know this insurance plan under CPF is another sucker scheme all along. But our feedback has fall on deaf ears. After all, our leaders think we are 'daft' so what we say can be ignored as 'just noise'.

It is suppose to be provide 'affordable' health care. Perhaps the premium is 'affordable' but the payout is miserable that hardly covers half the potential health care cost, which has been escalating drastically in recent years. We are talking about invalids who cannot perform 3 of  life daily activities. These folks will need help in their daily life and may required the service of a maid. They will find it hard to take public transport and may need to use the taxi. If the payout is already insufficient to cover medical needs, how are these invalids to cope with all these other costs ?

Besides, being handicap and unable to perform any 1 routine of daily activities is bad enough. Eldershield requires us to be almost totally handicap as they will only pay out when we cannot do 3 activities ! They cap the payout to 72 months, so pray hard we will die within their stipulated period. They don't care what happened to us after that. They are only interested in collecting the premium out front.

When CPF increases our minimum sum every year, they said it is due to inflation. But when they force us to buy their insurance schemes such as Eldershield, CPF life, the pay out never factors inflation cost. Their planning or lack of it is obvious. Take the recent example of CPF Life scheme. Its compulsory element will take effect next year. But it  has been revamped again this year. They reduced the 4 plans to 2 options.  Revamping it within such a short duration only shows poor conceptualization of the scheme.

Then the Eldershield scheme which was launched in 2002. In a short span of 5 years, CPF told us to upgrade it 2007. Hello - it is not free as seems to be implied by the press report, which say that "Government increased the monthly payout from $300 to $400, and the maximum payout period from 60 to 72 months".

We have to pay for the upgrade and were recommended to buy into their supplementary plan. If the Eldershield plan is a good scheme and well conceived, why do we need to buy into more and more plans? For an additional $400 payout from the supplementary plan, we ended up forking out 30% more in premium compare to the original Eldershield plan which includes the amount paid for the upgrade.

Now the government under PAP said they intend to review the plan  2013. Shark ! More bad news as more of our CPF money will be depleted again. Every time they made a mistake, we end up paying for it. They will come up with more fanciful plans, upgrade...etc and tell us to buy into their nonsense which never pay enough for us to survival anyway. Their top priority is still cost recovery.

The worst part is most of their schemes are compulsory or auto-inclusion. Unless one is alert and follow up with their non stop change in policies, one will be included in all these schemes unwittingly.

So be very alert ! Make it a point to opt OUT of any CPF scheme if given a chance. Our 'Central Ponzi Fund' is just that -  it is a bottomless greedy pit which sucks big time. There fooled us into believing that the various schemes are for our retirement, it will take care of our medical cost, it will see us through old age disability needs...which all fail to materialize !

Most of us already do not have enough fund for retirement. But all CPF is interested in, is to lock up and deplete our money with more devious schemes. They use our hard earn saving to buy into more govt bonds to fund govt spending and fund the big boys in risky investments which often turn into billions $ losses.




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