President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said he hopes Chinese students studying in Taiwan can be included in the National Health Insurance (NHI) system as soon as possible.
“[We] should act like a civilized nation,” in which Chinese students can enjoy the same treatment as Taiwanese, Ma said at a meeting at Chinese Youth International, a Taipei-based civil group devoted to the interactions of young people in Taiwan and overseas in various fields.
Whether to include Chinese students in Taiwan’s NHI system has been a controversial issue hotly debated among lawmakers, with opponents arguing that such a proposal could increase the financial burden on the system.
As a result, an amendment proposed by the Executive Yuan in 2012 to include Chinese students in the NHI system has been shelved at the legislature.
Ma said that offering Chinese students health insurance coverage would help both the students and the insurance system, as the students would likely consume few medical resources, but still have to pay an insurance fee of more than NT$600 each month.
Ma yesterday also said that he told Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) when they met in November last year that the “one China, different interpretations” principle would not evolve into “two Chinas,” “one China, one Taiwan,” or “Taiwan’s independence.”
It is “one China, different interpretations,” instead of “one China, random interpretations,” Ma said, after the controversial “one China, common interpretation” (一中同表) formula was criticized in Saturday’s debate among candidates running in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairmanship by-election.
Ma also said that “one China” refers to the Republic of China under the Constitution, and the two sides maintain the “status quo” of not seeking unification or independence and not using force against each other, he added.
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