Early retirees have higher healthcare expenditure than those who retire after 60, a study by the Chang Jung Christian University has shown.
A research team led by Wender Lin (林文德), an associate professor of healthcare administration, found that Taiwanese who retire before hitting 60 had higher healthcare costs than those who stop working past that age, with the overall medical outlay difference between the two groups estimated at between NT$771 million and NT$.769 billion (US$25.4 million and US$157.3 million).
The team derived their results by studying the healthcare expenditures of people who retired at between 50 and 59 years old over the three years prior to and six years after their retirement, and comparing these figures with those of non-retirees in the same age bracket.
The researchers found that those who were between 50 and 59 when they ceased working used outpatient services more often in the six years after their retirement than their working counterparts, resulting in a difference of between NT$968 and NT$2,676 per person in annual outpatient services expenses between the two groups.
The difference suggests that early retirement leads to an increase of health expenditure in outpatient services of between NT$657 million and NT$2.217 billion in total for that group, Lin said.
According to the study, the discrepancy in overall healthcare expenditure — the sum of outpatient and inpatient services costs — between early and later retirees is estimated to be nearly NT$4.8 billion at the most.
However, Lin said that the study’s results require further clarification, as additional research would be required to determine if the upsurge in medical expenses was an outcome of early retirees’ health deteriorating after they leave the workforce, or a result of their using healthcare services more often due to a lowered cost of time and desire to accrue “health capital.”
Health capital is defined as a person’s potential to be healthy in the course of their lifetime.
The medical expenses of people who retire in their 60s showed no significant difference when compared with those of working sexagenarians, the study showed.
Between 2001 and 2009, 40 percent of employees retired before the age of 60, while more than 60 percent of civil servants stopped working at that age between 2002 and 2010, data show.
Those figures put the national average retirement age at between 54 and 56, a relatively young age compared with the average for Organisation For Economic Co-operation and Development countries, most of which had national averages above 60, the team said.
The team said the nation’s comparatively young retiring age, coupled with factors such as an aging population and a low birthrate, could result in labor shortages, and create financial difficulties for the retirement pension and the National Health Insurance programs.
Given this, “the impact of the retirement age on the financial viability of the National Health Insurance system should be taken into account in future policy debate,” the researchers said.
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