Former health minister Dr Chua Soi Lek’s legacy will be remembered for his constant confrontation with doctor’s especially private ones and sometimes other medical staff.

Almost immediately after taking office, he appeared for some reason to listen to the views of consumer associations and appeared to form policies based on these associations’ feedback rather than on those of professionals both in and out of his ministry. Clearly he wanted to play to the gallery. He wanted to be known as the patient’s (read rakyat’s) savior.

He appeared to have this thing against private doctors. And so he picked his battle and went on a crusade against his own colleagues. Clinics were shut while maternity homes and medical centres were overnight deemed illegal, putting doctors and nurses out of jobs. Till this day, no clinic nor maternity home or centre knows whether they are truly legal or illegal. It doesn’t matter if the doctor is competent and has a triple Royal College certification.

What matters now is the ceiling height, the flooring, the double doors, trolleys or even the sinks. Yes, he wanted to be hands-on to the point of micro-management. Chua was certainly no Aneurin Bevan, the architect of the National Health Service who served under Clement Attlee’s Labour government in 1948. He neither had Bevan’s guile nor the skill to engage doctors.

But Chua mistakenly thought he had all of this and more. He thought he could preach ethics to doctors and nurses and give health education lessons to HIV patients while he himself was having a frolic of his own.

He took it upon himself to dust off the long discarded Private Healthcare and Facilities Act (PHFSA) 1998 though it was long abandoned by his predecessor Chua Jui Meng who termed it untenable and irrelevant. Chua surrounded himself with half-past six pseudo-legal medical experts and conned Parliament into passing it to the horror of the entire medical profession. This Act was criticised heavily by even the government’s own medico-legal experts from the judiciary. Worse still, he arm-twisted the Malaysian Medical Association into accepting it.

The MMA learnt its lesson well and it will be a long time before its members will ever trust in placing a government servant to lead the association now that it has to not only to clean up this mess but is in danger of being de-registered because government doctors entrusted to run its daily affairs obviously have thought ROS (Registrar of Society) rules don’t matter.

The PHFSA is a demeaning Act that allows the jailing and fining of a doctor (of all people) if a clinic is not run properly. What sick mind will conjure such a punishment? When Baby Yok Shan lost her arm, and appropriate punishment was expected for the two doctors concerned in government service, nothing came of it. In direct contrast, a similar episode that happened in Moscow got both the doctor and nurse a one-year prison term. In that case, an intravenous injection was given in an arm that resulted in the arm having to be amputated in a state hospital in November last year.

Why the double standards? Chua Soi Lek operated arrogantly and preferred not working with his colleagues but rather looked down upon them. For him it was always one rule for them and another rule for us.

This story certainly cannot end with his resignation. The Special Branch must investigate if our dismal healthcare performance over the last four years has had anything to do with this man’s lack of focus. And if bad decisions were made, they must be reversed. The business of government is serious, but Chua Soi Lek took it as his personal fiefdom and made rules that clearly contravened existing medical practices.

Unless investigated, our health ringgit may have already taken the path of no return. The prime minister may perhaps do well and make the Health Ministry apolitical. Hire instead an experienced CEO from the private sector to lead this ministry into making consistent long-term policies - unlike the disruptive new broom scenario representative of the political football that the Health Ministry has become.