The Bureau of National Health Insurance will become a regular government body, and the sizeable annual bonuses enjoyed by its employees will be reduced accordingly, Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) told lawmakers yesterday.
"We are still working on the details, but this is the direction in which we are moving," Su said on the legislative floor yesterday in response to a question from Taiwan Solidarity Union Legislator Lo Chi-ming (
Although the bureau is technically a government office, it is operated like a private firm. Its employees received annual bonuses of up to four-and-a-half times their monthly salary this year, while other government employees only receive one-and-a-half months' salary.
Department of Health Minister Hou Sheng-mou (
However, it is run as a private firm and its employees' annual bonus depends on how much money the bureau has saved or earned for the government.
Making the bureau a regular government department would definitely solve a lot of problems, Hou said.
Meanwhile, Su denied a report in a Chinese-language newspaper yesterday that the Cabinet has already resolved to make the bureau part of the Department of Health.
"This is not true. No decision has been made yet," Su said.
Council of Labor Affairs Minister Lee Ying-yuan (
However, it will take time for the DOH and CLA to hammer out the details and decide who would take over the health insurance bureau, Lee said.
When asked by Lo whether he would be former premier Frank Hsieh's (
"If I cannot even do my current job well, it would not make any sense for me to say anything more, would it?" Su said.
Su said that he and Hsieh are both dedicated to Taiwan, but his priority now is to do his job well, because it will also help the Democratic Progressive Party's presidential campaign, no matter who represents the party in 2008.
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