The past few months, I had to deal with some medical doctors at a few private hospitals. After my experience with majority of them, I have lost my respect for the medical profession. Not only are some of them downright arrogant, they charge like leeches sucking your blood.

Each ward round they make, they charged about RM100 even though it was just a "Hello, how are you today". It came to the point when I felt like telling them "Please don't come today. I am fine. You are not welcome as I have to pay you RM100 for nothing."

Some even made two ward rounds per day and charged twice. Is doing nothing much part of your professional consultancy and warrants that much money? Where is your conscience, especially when you are supposed to save lives, not make huge profits out of other people's misery.

I have friends who have given up on our local hospitals and prefer to go to Australia for treatment. They said that with the amount of money they pay locally, they could have a good holiday in Australia plus have their treatment done at a good hospital.

Over there, treatment comes in a package. The doctors will do their ward rounds everyday no matter how long the patients are going to stay. There is a fixed reasonable lump sum for a particular treatment. There is no such thing as charging per ward round which is open to abuse by unethical doctors.

You could argue that if you don't like private hospitals, go to the government hospitals. All of us would like to have treatment at government hospitals, but the waiting list is usually very long. I was told that I might have to wait for a few months before I could be treated. Do we really have a choice then? Does this warrant private medical practitioners taking advantage of our misery?

If you have insurance, their charges are even higher. Of course, this will be passed back to us by the insurance companies.

It is very sad that this noble profession has deteriorated to that of a money-spinning unethical profession not different from the business world. It is not difficult to see why many parents want their children to get into the medical profession. If they say that they really want to save lives, I would find it difficult to believe.

No one is saying that you should not make money. What I am saying is that please charge reasonably. If you charge me RM30 to RM40 for your "Hello, how are you today?", I could still accept it, but it is ridiculous and an insult to your profession to charge over RM100.

It is high time our government control the charges of private medical practitioners, especially when it can't provide enough doctors and facilities at the government hospitals.