By: Ben Matchap
Hospital beds full but mall lots are empty, yet we build more malls instead of hospitals. Good governance?
Here’s an idea, why not we convert failing shopping malls into hospitals and make use the the space in our land constrained country?
Do I need to be an expert to point this out? Am I qualified to say the emperor has no clothes and this is a huge oversight ?
With more people choosing to shift to online shopping and the economy taking a down turn coupled with the rising cost of rent pushing the retail sector to just use the internet and pop-up stores to sell their goods, why are we building more malls?
Just because some malls are doing well does not mean we should build more and those malls will in turn do well. Why is Orchard Road getting emptier? Because now we have more malls in the heartlands with lower rents, plus like I mentioned before people are shopping online.
For a country that has a shortage of hospital beds why are we still building more malls? The government likes to repeat that we are a small country and we have land constraints. If that is the case maybe what we need is more hospitals instead of shopping malls that no one is going to use.
This is one of the unarguable points of bad governance. Our hospitals are already working at above its normal capacity, we are putting beds in hall ways and we are not ever having an emergency.
In a national crisis like a terrorist attack or virus outbreak what are we going to do? Put more beds in the hospital parking lots?
Also with an aging population maybe anticipating to accommodate for more hospital space isn’t a bad idea because is it such a far stretch of the imagination that old people might fall sick or suffer from more health issues than the younger generation?
So to sum this up, LESS MALLS MORE HOSPITALS PLEASE!