Daily lessons from Life 06 September 2009

"Doctor who goes the extra mile
He gives free medical care to the needy. -Sun, Sep 06, 2009 The Straits Times

A DOCTOR who thinks nothing of giving free medical care to the needy was honoured yesterday with a Good Neighbour award from his Member of Parliament.

Dr Kong Kum Leng, 65, who has been tending to residents at his Marine Parade clinic for the past 35 years, received a trophy from his MP, Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong.

'I feel very happy and it inspires me to continue to work as long as my health permits,' he told reporters in between patient consultations."

Well. Good on the good doctor. He has his priority in life absolutely right. At 65, and being a doctor, he should have made enough money to last a lifetime if he lives a healthy and decent lifestyle. Another 1 or 2 thousand dollars from his patients who could not afford to pay him a month won't make him any richer!

Lessons for me are:

1. be financially independence when we reach that age. Be healthy and still useful to contribute our expertise and help others who are not as fortunate as us;

2. look for meaningfulness in what we do and do not indulge in 'things'. I may be a bit too strict here. For me, even indulging in a game or certain food or certain thing is not desirable. The Chinese has a saying: when you play with 'things', you will lose the desire to do good and continue to be progressive! I think it has a lot of truth. e.g. many Ministers play golf. Which is fine except everyone play every week or more than once a week. Is this desirable?;

3. while the recognition is great we will go one-step further to acknowledge that the recognition also means we need more Dr. Kongs around. Hopefully, the government is not passing the buck to private good Samaritans to provide the bigger social safety net that ensure no Singaporeans will die just because they could not pay for medical care. It will be tragic if such cases happened when we called our nation a 1st world country!

May Dr. Kong lives forever and continue to do good for his patients who may be in financial difficulties without recourse to the government aid!