The Taipei City Government said yesterday it was determined to pay back its National Health Insurance subsidy debts within five years, dismissing allegations that it recently tried to take back several plots of land seized by the central government by exchanging them for 13 plots with lower market value.
The Supreme Administrative Court has ordered the city government to pay NT$34.7 billion (US$1.06 billion) in debt accumulated since 1999, when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), then the mayor of Taipei, stopped payments in protest against the method of calculating insurance contributions.
The Bureau of National Health Insurance seized 31 plots of land in 2004 and asked the city government to auction the land and pay its debts.
A report in the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) yesterday said Ma had been pressuring the bureau to return the 31 plots of land to the city government in exchange for 13 plots of land that have a lower estimated market value.
The city government’s Finance Department and Labor Department yesterday acknowledged that the city government was trying to swap land with the bureau, but said it had proposed 22 plots of land with an estimated market value of NT$800 million which are located in upmarket districts, including Zhongzheng (中正) and Zhongshan (中山) districts.
Department commissioner Chiu Da-chan (邱大展) said the bureau had inspected the 22 plots of land and agreed to exchange them for two plots of land it had seized, valued at around NT$700 million.
The two plots of land were to be used to build the No. 2 Nangang Exhibition Hall and Taipei Cultural and Tourism Exchange Center before being seized by the central government.
“Most of the 22 plots are located in areas with great development potential, and the city government would actually suffer losses by only getting back two pieces of land,” he said.
Su Ying-kuei (蘇盈貴), commissioner of the city’s labor department, said Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) had told department heads in a municipal meeting that he wanted the issue resolved and the debts repaid within five years.
Local governments are required by law to pay one-third of the costs of medical treatment incurred in the previous year by residents in their jurisdiction.
Ma refused to pay the debts and argued that it was unfair to ask the city to cover those who work in Taipei but whose household registration was not in the city.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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