Khairy said Malaysia’s healthcare system lacked transparency and long-term direction.
He said the authority should be similar to the UK’s Care Quality Commission, and that it must be independent of the health ministry and tasked with auditing hospital service delivery, pricing, and regulatory enforcement.
“Without an independent health audit body and pricing authority, we wouldn’t know the actual cost of care, what the price benchmarks are, how service quality is measured, and how hospitals are performing.
“This is a structural issue that requires time to fix, and it’s not a small reform either. Forming an independent health audit body is part of a wider transformation to reform Malaysia’s health system,” he said at a healthcare conference here today.
Khairy said Malaysia’s current public healthcare model, where the health ministry acted simultaneously as provider, regulator, and paymaster, was no longer fit for its purpose.
He maintained that the health ministry must still exist but its roles should be decentralised.
“Oversight should be separated from service delivery, which should be handled by district health offices and public health clusters,” he said. “That’s the only way to ensure transparency and agility.”
The former Umno leader said Malaysia’s healthcare system remained too focused on high-volume, episodic treatment, with public hospitals primarily “rewarded” based on the number of procedures they performed, not on the outcome of their patients.
“Many of our problems come from this volume-based model, which is outdated. Hospitals get more funding because they do more surgeries or scans, not because they keep people healthier,” he said.
Khairy acknowledged that implementing preventive care and value-based healthcare in Malaysia would not be easy, due to engrained public attitudes.
“Malaysian society expects healthcare to cure them when they’re already sick. When we try to tell them to live healthier, they tell us to not inform them how to live their lives.
“However, when they fall sick and it starts to get worse, they want us to cure them, but that’s the most expensive time to intervene,” he said.
To overcome this, he said, reforms must include public education about what “value” in healthcare really meant, and was not merely about getting free treatment when unwell.
“It’s about faster access, better follow-up care, shorter waiting times, and doctors who actually know your history,” he said.
He added that many frontline healthcare workers already knew what needed to change but were stuck in a system that rewarded volume over value.