Some children do slip through the welfare net for low-income families, but the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) says there are a variety of programs that provide financial, education and medical assistance to poor children.
Ministry officials outlined the benefits available to such children yesterday in response to newspaper reports that a child is born to an impoverished family every 90 minutes in Taiwan.
"Various local governments provide financial and medical assistance to low-income households with children," said Huang Bi-hsia (
According to Huang, low-income families with children under the age of three are eligible to receive daycare tuition aid of NT$1,500 per month per child.
"In addition, we provide free health care for all children under the age of three as one component of the National Health Insurance program. Between last year and this year, various local governments spent a total of NT$500 million on medical aid for children in low-income families," Huang said.
However, to date, there are still 10,000 children under the age of three who have not registered with the Bureau of National Health Insurance.
"We have already urged various local governments to inform the parents of these children about the availability of this free health care for children," said Vice Minister of the Interior Hsu Ing-shen (
Huang also said that educational coupons of NT$10,000 per school year per child are also available to families with low incomes.
"In addition, single-parent families or dysfunctional families who have special child-related needs are able to receive assistance, such as counseling and tutoring, from social workers or civic welfare foundations," Huang said.
The interior ministry has worked with the Ministry of Education to devise a "children in low and middle-to-low-income families tuition aid project" that is expected to pass into law next year.
"If this draft is passed, the government is expected to set aside a budget of NT$190 million through which each child under six in a low-income family will be able to receive daycare or kindergarten tuition aid of up to NT$6,000 per child per semester," Huang said.
According to the interior ministry's Department of Social Affairs, the determination of whether a family is low-income or not is based on the poverty line where the family lives.
"For instance, in Taipei, if the total income of a household is under NT$13,333 per month, this household is considered to be low-income," said Tseng Chung-ming (曾中明), deputy head of the Department of Social Affairs.
"Of course, the figure differs from area to area," he said.
"Children are the masters of the future. Please be assured that the government will do its best to take care of them," Hsu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching