A senior Department of Health (DOH) official said yesterday that a self-payment ratio hike for out-patients and emergency patients will be announced on Wednesday.
DOH Secretary-General Lai Chin-hsiang (賴進祥) also said the hike is expected to be put into effect July 16. His words came after Department of Health Deputy Minister Chen Tzay-jinn (陳再晉) and Bureau of National Health Insurance (BNHI) chief Liu Chien-hsiang (劉見祥) earlier in the day denied such reports.
Chen said that although the DOH and the BNHI are hoping for a hike in the self-payment ratio, they will respect the decision of a national health insurance supervisory committee on when to put it into effect.
However, Lai said that the self-payment amount for out-patients and emergency patients will be raised, while the self-payment amount for those visiting practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and dentists will not be raised. Lai said a national health insurance supervisory committee is not opposed to the hike, but it has expressed the hope that the DOH will prepare complementary measures.
According to the fee hike plan envisaged by the BNHI, the self-payment amount for outpatients for district, regional and national hospitals will be raised to NT$80, NT$240 and NT$360, respectively, from the present NT$50, NT$140 and NT$210, while the self-payment amount for emergency patients for regional and national hospitals will be raised to NT$300 and NT$450, respectively, from NT$210 and NT$420.
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
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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