Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Know your rights


LAST month, one of my friend fallen down to the floor while he is working OT at his office. The incident happened on 8:00pm and even in front of his own boss. He has been working in the company for more than 4 years since he landed in lion city. So he could be considered one of senior staffs. He got nothing for doing OT every night. But he keep doing OT since he has always more than good enough assignment. It's fine for a worker to devote his/her time to employer.

After falling down, he was unable to stand up himself and boss suggested to call ambulance. He raised his hand to show his disagreement on calling ambulance. He knows hows much the hospital bill is going to be if he is admitted to any hospital. Calling ambulance mean he would be brought to nearby hospital. With the fear of hospital, he blocked the boss's suggestion by asking him to try with nearby clinic first. He felt pain but he alter the best option to cheaper one. In fact, he's going to get marry on coming CNY and he is afraid of postpone due to his medical condition. So he tried not to get himself in the uncontrollable situation.

Later, he understands from clinic doctor that his kidney is not functioning well. The doctor again advised him to go hospital but he refused. My friend requested the doctor to try other methods rather than sending hospital. The doctor with the consent of my friend tried to prescribe few medicine to wait and see condition. However, the doctor reminded him that he will have to go if the condition is not better after prescription is finished. He easily agreed and prayed not to get bad outcome. One week later, the result came out and he feels a bit better and again he urged the doctor to continue medicine. He only took few days medical leaves despite the doctor asked him to rest longer days.

He is such loyalty to his company. However those all worthiness turned appalling once he is told by company HR manager that he cannot claim medical expenses which is about S$500 only. He thought his boss would allow his bills because the boss saw he collapse during working at the office. But he finally understood that he had to bear those all bill by himself. He had bought medical insurance from one local bank 6 months before this incident. Thus, he went to the bank to know if his insurance could cover the bills or not. But he found out that the bank is demanding so many documentation that are not easily sustainable in his view. Once he shared his experience me, I encourage him to chase the documents to provide insurance. His answer is that he don't want to take any more leaves because he'll have to take leave if he wants to chase those required documents.

We all were told by insurance company staffs how would it be cover when we fallen into sick before we decided to buy their insurance. It's disappointing to know it is hard to re-claim medical expenses once we need their help to settle our case. In fact, it's easier to cheat those potential clients who are lack of legal knowledge by agents. Despite we are working in oversea now, we all don't take care enough local laws when everything goes right with us. It is our fault that we are not prepared for those stormy days ahead. It really makes us vulnerable people compare to our counterparts from other countries. I'm writing this post to share other case involved by other foreign worker. We'll learn how they all prepare to protect their interest in the foreign land. Hopefully you'll want to wait to read my next post. Stay tuned in. I'll be back soon.

1 comment:

  1. စိတ္မေကာင္းပါဘူး ။
    သူ၀ယ္တဲ့အင္ရႉးရန္ ကုမ္ပဏီကလဲ သူ၀ယ္တာ ေဆးရုံတက္ရတဲ့ ပလန္ၿဖစ္လိမ့္မယ္ ။ ဒါ ဆို ေဆးရုံတက္ရရင္ ကာဘာၿဖစ္တယ္ေလ ။ ေၿပာၿပ ဘို႔ ေနာက္ မွ ဖုန္းဆက္လိုက္မယ္ ။

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