The Ministry of Health and Welfare yesterday made public 36 suggestions recently put forward by the second-generation National Health Insurance (NHI) program review team, which include allowing non-Taiwanese babies to be covered by the program upon birth, spurring criticism from civic groups.
The suggestions were tendered in April by the review team, which consists of seven specialists brought together by Minister of Health and Welfare Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達) in March last year and is headed by former minister of health Yeh Ching-chuan (葉金川).
The specialists drew up the advice after deliberating in eight plenary and 16 group meetings over the past year on the structure, insurance policy, revenue and spending of the second-generation NHI program, which took effect in January last year.
The suggestions include letting babies born to non-Taiwanese parents in the nation be covered by the NHI program upon birth, rather than six months later, per current rules; using the combined annual incomes of insured individuals to determine their eligibility for exemption from the 2 percent supplementary premium; and increasing the current NT$10 million (US$328,790) cap on the maximum amount of taxable income subject to the supplementary premium.
Currently, a 2 percent supplementary premium is imposed on each income exceeding the monthly minimum wage — NT$19,273 — that an insured individual earns from other jobs.
Earnings from five other sources — rent, interest, stock dividends, professional practice and job bonuses that are more than four times the individual’s monthly salary — would also be subject to the supplementary premium if they are higher than NT$5,000.
Other major suggestions include extending the NHI program to all residents of the nation regardless of their nationality and imposing the same premiums on them, based on the “ability-to-pay” principle.
In response, Chu Tong-kuang (曲同光), director of the ministry’s Department of Social Insurance, said the review team has advised the ministry to also include money won by chance, such as lottery rewards, and income from property sales to the list of earnings subject to the supplementary premium.
As for the inclusion of babies born to non-Taiwanese parents in the program shortly after birth, Chu said that since doing so would require legislative amendments, the ministry would consider the idea for the time being.
The ministry said that, as some of the suggestions could cause widespread effects and thus need deliberation, the proposals are to be discussed at the next stage of NHI program reform.
However, civic groups yesterday criticized the proposals.
Taiwan Healthcare Reform Foundation researcher Shen Pei-han (沈珮涵) said that even if the ministry decided to determine insured people’s eligibility for exemption from the supplementary premium based on the combined annual incomes earned from the above six sources, it would not help assuage long-running contentions that the NHI program was unfair.
“Moreover, that the ministry has repeatedly failed to give serious thought to the root causes of the program’s inequality problems constitutes severe malfeasance,” Shen said.
National Health Insurance Civic Surveillance Alliance spokesperson Eva Teng (滕西華) said some of the advice was in the earliest version of the second-generation NHI program design guidebook, criticizing the advisory report as lacking new ideas and foresight.
“Not only do the suggestions fail to meet the public’s expectation for a truly reformed NHI program, they also do not seem to stand a good chance of being carried out,” Teng said.
OVERHAUL NEEDED: The government should improve its agricultural processing capabilities and expand to new markets to limit its reliance on China, an expert said China’s ban on Taiwanese pineapples was “unsurprising,” and Taiwan should have years ago altered its produce export strategies and target customers, experts said. China on Friday abruptly suspended imports of pineapples from Taiwan, saying that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful biological entities” on the fruit. Calling it an “unfriendly” move, the Council of Agriculture (COA) said that 99.79 percent of the pineapples sent to China since last year have met China’s import standards. Chiao Chun (焦鈞), the author of Fruits and Politics — A Recollection of Cross-strait Agricultural Interaction Over the Past Decade (水果政治學：兩岸農業交流十年回顧與展望), said that China’s announcement is clearly targeting
‘NOT COLD ENOUGH’: Schools are disregarding Premier Su Tseng-chang’s instruction that students may wear out-of-uniform clothing to stay warm, an association said An investigative report revealed that 72.5 percent of the nation’s senior-high schools and 95.6 percent of junior-high schools punish students for wearing unapproved winter clothes in contravention of educational guidelines, lawmakers and student rights advocates said yesterday. Speaking at a news conference at the Legislative Yuan, the Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy said there is an endemic disregard for the Ministry of Education’s regulations and that private schools are more likely to contravene ministry rules. The report is a compilation of 2,856 student reports about dress code reinforcement at 425 high schools and vocational high schools, the association said. Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌)
DISSATISFACTION? If the referendums collect more than 700,000 signatures each, they would have gotten the most signatures in the shortest time, the party said The Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) two referendum petitions — one on banning the importation of pork with traces of ractopamine and the other on holding referendums on the same day as national elections — had as of Thursday gathered 691,398 and 674,497 signatures respectively, the party said yesterday. If the petitions collect more than 700,000 signatures apiece, they would have garnered the most signatures in the shortest time since the Referendum Act (公民投票法) was amended in 2017, party officials said. The KMT proposed the “anti-ractopamine pork” or “food safety” referendum just days after President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) announcement on Aug. 28 last
DECADES OF INFLUENCE: Over the past 20 years, China has made inroads with Aborigines, funding political campaigns and trips, a legislator said Lawmakers have called on the National Security Bureau to investigate claims of pervasive Chinese influence among Aboriginal communities. Legislators pointed to a surge in communist propaganda and Chinese-funded projects over the past few years, which they say are aimed at infiltrating and buying political influence among Aboriginal communities. “China has for decades carried out wide-ranging ‘united front’ tactics and propaganda campaigns targeting Aborigines,” said Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Ying (陳瑩), a member of the Puyuma community in Taitung County. “Now, they are influencing elections for local councilors and village chiefs, offering money for candidates to mount their campaigns, and to
RSS