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Health-care price hike is daylight robbery

Taiwan has probably never seen a ten-fold rise in the price of a basic service during times of peace. But this, shocking as it sounds, is set to happen on Sept. 1. The price in question: the fee payable at the point of treatment under the National Health Insurance program.

Think about it. Just how absurd is a national health insurance system in which, after paying your premiums, you have to pay higher fees for a visit to the hospital than before you were covered by the program? The Bureau of National Health Insurance has said the price hike is intended to improve the program's finances and realize the patient transfer system. It is deceiving itself and deceiving others by claiming this.

If the financial situation of the insurance program is so desperate that only such "exploitation" of the public can prolong its life, then why are employees of the bureau still getting year-end and performance bonuses equivalent to four-and-a-half months of their salaries? Does the performance of the employees have nothing to do with the insurance program losing money? Meanwhile, instead of trying harder to collect the combined NT$30 billion debt owed by Taipei and Kaohsiung cities, the bureau wants to turn its guns on the innocent public and make them the scapegoats. How can this be acceptable to anyone?

Will the price hike, moreover, actually help to bring the patient transfer system into being? Despite its significant number of medical economists, the bureau has come up with a simplistic and extremely crude method of using prices to control volume. The price hike may force some members of the public to visit basic-level clinics instead of hospitals, but I believe a majority of patients will grit their teeth and try to cut other expenses so that they can still go to large hospitals, while at the same time cursing the government for its incompetence. After all, some pleasures can be sacrificed, but we only have one life.

Why does the government keep coming up with stopgap measures for problems facing the health insurance program? Only recently the new "overall payment system" caused two patients to commit suicide because they were not able to register for hospital treatment. Does the bureau want to push more people to death with this price hike? One can only sigh in despair at this government-sanctioned theft.

Gao Jyh-peng is a DPP legislator.

Translated by Francis Huang
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