Our Deputy Prime Minister, congratulating the Raffles Medical Group for making the medical arts available to the well-heeled, sees in Bangkok's plush Bumrungrad Hospital an exemplar of success. So he says,
Thailand sees an estimated one million foreign patients a year. The lion’s share goes to the Bumrungrad Hospital, which has almost single-handedly come to define medical tourism in Asia. ... [After the Asian financial crisis of 1997,]... domestic demand for private healthcare collapsed, the Baht lost 60 per cent of its value against the US dollar, and many new hospitals built just before the crisis in anticipation of growing local demand, faced two choices – they could either fold up or seek new markets overseas. Those who took the latter path succeeded, exploiting the growing global demand for good healthcare as well as the cheap Baht.Actually, I don't quite know what to make of "almost single-handedly" in this passage. Did Wong mean that Bumrungrad owed only a little of its commercial success to government funding? I mean, we all know how closely the Thai government is closely tied to business interests, but what would a publicly-listed company with rich, captive clients want with fiscal injection...?
But let me guess. The speechwriter clipped from these articles.
"Almost single-handedly", combined with "has come to define". Brilliant!
1 comment:
A colleague offered a great solution to our problem. The phrase the speechwriter was probably thinking about was,
... which has almost singlehandedly REDEFINED medical tourism in Asia.
Which would be hyperbole, of course.
The reason "singlehandedly" cannot pair with "has come to define" is that if a thing has come to define some bigger idea, it is as much attributable to the lack of credible competitors as to the credit of the subject in question. iPod has come to define portable music, but it's not just the credit of Apple's engineers. It also means Sony and Creative have failed to keep up.
All this, of course, has not stopped iTunes from singlehandedly redefining music distribution online. :)
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