The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-dominated legislature yesterday voted to unfreeze NT$2.5 billion (US$83.8 million) earmarked by the Department of Health (DOH) in this year’s budget to pay for health insurance fees owed by the Taipei and Kaohsiung city governments to the central government.
NT$2.41 billion was doled out to Taipei and NT$90 million to Kaohsiung as the central government decided to help the two city governments pay back the debts in five years, starting this year.
Among the 18 local governments that owe the National Health Insurance Bureau (NHIB), the Taipei City Government tops the list with a total of NT$44.7 billion outstanding. Its debt has been accumulating since 1999, when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), then the Taipei mayor, refused to pay the health insurance subsidies for non-Taipei residents.
PHOTO: CNA
The Kaohsiung City Government owes NT$22.6 billion as of August this year.
Noting that the Kaohsiung City Government has already proposed a 10-year plan to pay off its debt in installments, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Pan Meng-an (潘孟安) yesterday slammed the passage of the budget, saying it had dragged the Kaohsiung City Government down the drain along with the Taipei City Government.
It was unreasonable for taxpayers to pay for the debt incurred by Ma, under whose time as Taipei mayor the debt had accumulated, Pan said.
In other developments, the KMT yesterday finalized its national health insurance (NHI) reform package after Department of Health Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) presented the latest version at a KMT caucus meeting attended by Vice Premier Sean Chen (陳冲) and KMT Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰).
Under the latest reform package, the NHI premium rate will be slightly less than the current 5.17 percent of an individual’s salary.
But the package also calls for a new source of premium revenues that had previously gone untapped. The program will collect 2 percent of stock dividends, interest income, professional income and “high bonuses” as a “supplemental premium” to strengthen the system’s finances. “High bonuses” are defined as total bonuses that are at least four times higher than an individual’s monthly salary.
The latest package was a compromise after Yaung’s plan to calculate NHI premiums based on household income failed to receive the endorsement of KMT -lawmakers when it was sent to the legislature for final review earlier this month.
KMT Legislative caucus whip Lin Yi-shih (林益世) said the party hoped the revised proposal could be screened during Tuesday’s session.
However, several academics yesterday voiced their objection to the revised plan.
“The revised plan keeps the major defects of the original plan — including categorization of the insured by profession and the complicated administrative process in transferring,” former NHIB president Chu Tse-min (朱澤民) told a news conference. “I don’t think this is what Yaung had aimed for initially.”
When the insured are categorized by profession, the percentage of the premium to be paid by people in the same category remains the same despite each individual in the category may have different amount of income, Chu said.
By complicating the administrative process, Chu meant that each time a person leaves a job, they have to transfer their NHI record out and move it into their new employer’s account.
Additional reporting by staff writer and CNA
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