The National Health Insurance Administration’s (NHIA) capping of psychiatric patients’ prescription medication expenses at NT$55 per day violates both the spirit of the NHI and basic human rights, several civic groups said this week.
People who will be affected by the agency’s announcement include those with chronic mental illness, categorized as a major illness, and those who suffer from dementia, major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and autism, the groups said.
Several organizations, including the NHI Civic Surveillance Alliance, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and Taiwan Alzheimer’s Disease, said that if the policy, now in place in central Taiwan, is to be implemented nationally, it would take a toll on more than 1 million people.
Each kind of disease needs a particular kind of treatment and medication, depending on how serious a condition the patient is in, which makes it almost impossible to standardize the amount according to a few hospitals’ averaged drug expenses, the groups’ statement said.
“The condition of some might be stabilized by a therapy that costs NT$38, but some would need one that requires thousands of dollars to achieve the same state,” NHI Civic Surveillance Alliance spokeswoman Eva Teng (滕西華) said.
“NT$55 for daily drug expenses is backtracking on human rights, and it would make a socially vulnerable group unable to benefit from new drugs. Patients would either have to pay out of pocket or suffer the onset of the diseases and be sent for long-term hospitalization,” she said.
Foundation for the Welfare of the Elderly secretary-general Wu Yu-chin (吳玉琴) said that the just-ended NHI global budget negotiations “championed the fair distribution of medical resources and care for vulnerable groups. And the vulnerable include those with major illnesses and injuries, of which the group of psychiatric patients is the second-largest in number.”
In response, the NHIA said that the policy was intended to curb some psychiatry departments that have been found to excessively prescribe expensive drugs, without appropriate and necessary records and documents to support their use.
Shen Mao-ting (沈茂庭), director of the agency’s Medical Review and Pharmaceutical Benefits Division, said that the cap, which for the medical centers is NT$69, is an averaged amount that has been carefully evaluated.
The agency stated that 90 percent of hospitals will not be affected by the policy, which is aimed at reining in unreasonable use of high-priced drugs or multiple prescriptions.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the