Jake's View | Is the latest health-cost scare a trial balloon for GST?
Let's deal first with questions of exactitude in the numbers. I cannot make out whether this (it-just-happened-to-happen) leak by officialdom was expressed in nominal dollar-of-the-day terms or inflation-adjusted real terms.
Hong Kong will have to spend much more than expected on elderly health care in future, according to revised government predictions that show previous estimates were far too low … the government's fiscal advisers ... added that tax changes seemed inevitable to meet the cost.
Let's deal first with questions of exactitude in the numbers. I cannot make out whether this (it-just-happened-to-happen) leak by officialdom was expressed in nominal dollar-of-the-day terms or inflation-adjusted real terms.
For instance, we have mention of a 3.3 per cent economic growth rate, which is a figure in real terms, and then of 3 per cent growth in a $48.8 billion health bill, which is a figure in nominal terms. Let's get this straight, shall we, folks. It makes an enormous difference when we're talking figures up to the year 2041.
And then there's the question of how much these population projections can be moved up and down by public policy changes. When our chief executive tweaked the rules on mainland women giving birth in Hong Kong, our statisticians had to make notable changes to their population models.
