Dissecting the rising cost of living in Malaysia

LETTER | The soaring cost of living in this country has become increasingly worrisome among Malaysians. To sustain an assured standard of living, Malaysians need to have a stable income that at least could provide them with enough money to cover their essential expenses like accommodation, health services and public transportation.

According to a poll by Emir Research, 36 percent of Malaysians are not satisfied with the Pakatan Harapan government’s action on stabilising the price of our necessities, while 43 percent are satisfied. Even though the satisfaction numbers are slightly higher than the numbers of dissatisfaction, the number of Malaysians who are unsure is 22 percent. That means a total of 65 percent Malaysians are either dissatisfied or unsure, which is surely a sign of unhappiness.

The question here is, how much money does a person need to live in Malaysia?

For accommodation, the rent prices can be up to RM3,000 per month in the city centre like Kuala Lumpur, but the prices go down as the location moves away from the city centre.

Meanwhile, for house prices, experts highlighted that these are far off from what Malaysians can afford, especially for the new-launched houses, as on average, these could cost almost 48 percent higher from the topmost affordable houses in Malaysia. With such prices, no wonder Malaysians especially millennials, like to whine and push the government to pull out all the stops and provide them with fair housing prices.

Findings from other surveys indicate that there is no normal average salary that can pull alongside the booming house prices in Malaysia. This year Hong Kong is in the first rank of the most expensive property market worldwide with a US$1.24 million (RM 5.14 million) property price.

Although Malaysia is not on the list, Malaysia can be considered as a relatively “young city”, where property prices should be more reasonable for locals. However, nearly all our properties are unreasonable to the majority of Malaysian’s salary earners. Due to this, you can find an abundance of unsold houses in Malaysia.

This issue is consistent with the poll result by Emir Research where it shows that only 38 percent of Malaysians are satisfied with the plans of the affordable home policy introduced by the government, while the others are not satisfied and unsure with it.

The government intends to build one million affordable units in the next 10 years, that are focused on five main core areas – improving accessibility and affordability, quality housing, cohesive neighbourhood, improving coordination between housing development and transportation as well as strengthening institutional relations.

On the cost of health service in Malaysia, this is not a trivial issue as there is roughly a 15 percent increase, and it will double every six years, according to experts. With this rise, getting sick is scaring Malaysians. Or in other words, can Malaysians afford to get sick?

Well sometimes keeping oneself to stay healthy all the time is like when hell freezes over. Like it or not, Malaysians need to be prepared with extra savings that can be used when needed.

Generally, the treatment fees of public hospitals are cheaper than the private ones, but due to several issues like having to wait for a long time to be diagnosed and treated caused them to shift to the private hospitals.

A survey found on average, 26 percent of respondents quoted that the reason they change to private hospitals from the public hospitals is because of the long waiting hours. However, as we all know, the fees for private hospitals cost a fortune since the hospitals need to keep up with their standards by laying out the best services they could give.

To iron out this issue, the best thing that Malaysians could do is through health insurance that will provide them with a secure fund that got them covered at any time. Those uninsured obtain fewer medical and timely care, resulting in worse health outcomes. Besides, uninsured people would definitely cause a burden especially financially to their families.

Unfortunately, most Malaysians have the same perception – buying insurance is a financial burden that will add up to their monthly expenses. But what they don’t realise is it will come very handy when death is at their doorstep.

Insurance agents, too, have a role to play. They should take a relatively shorter time to explain the insurance’s policies and recommend policies that are really needed by the people.

Based on the poll conducted by Emir Research, Malaysians over 51 years old are worried the most with the Harapan government in allocating the budget for health services compared to the other age range.

Mostly, this is because they are not fully prepared financially for their retirement, and they are worried the increasing cost of the health service may just deplete whatever meagre saving they have.

One way to mitigate this problem is for the government to increase the retirement age, and make it easier for retired people with specific specialities and experience to remain in the workforce past their retirement age.

As the saying goes, “health is wealth’, so a scheme has actually been introduced by the government that will focus on health screenings for the recipients of "Household Living Aid", (Bantuan Sara Hidup, BSH) aged 50 and above, as well as their spouses.

This Health Care Scheme (Peduli Kesihatan, PeKa) is for the bottom 40 percent category of PeKa B40 and is expected to benefit 800,000 Malaysians of the same age category, beginning last March.

Generally, health screenings are conducted to test and examine any disease before any symptoms are perceived. This is exactly a bigger fish to fry since prevention is better than cure and cost less money.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of Malaysians aged 51 and above are worried about the quality of our public transport. This implies their concern for more provisions of elderly-friendly facilities in the public transportation system.

The writer is research assistant at Emir Research, a think-tank focused on strategic policy recommendations.

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