Naming long-term care services for the elderly as a top priority of her government, president-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that the program would be funded mainly by income from gift and inheritance taxes, which she wants to increase slightly.
Asked about public fears over a sharp hike in the tax rate, which is as low as 10 percent for some taxpayers and has been criticized as “benefiting rich people,” Tsai said in an interview published yesterday by the Chinese-language China Times that “we will not let gift and inheritance taxes climb too steeply.”
According to the long-term care policy mapped out by Tsai and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the program for the elderly would be funded by tax revenue with a budget of between NT$30 billion and NT$40 billion (US$921.8 million and US$1.23 billion) a year.
Some taxes, including gift, inheritance and property taxes, would be designated to provide the funding.
To increase revenue, the gift and inheritance tax rates would be raised to 20 percent in the initial stage, according to Tsai’s plan.
While the business sector has expressed concern that the sales tax would be increased to finance Tsai’s long-term care policy, she told the newspaper that she has not considered increasing it.
A moderate hike to gift and inheritance taxes and the allocation of government budget “should be sufficient in the early stages,” Tsai said.
Tsai’s planned long-term care system was criticized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) before the presidential election on Jan. 16, as it had already promoted its own version.
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) government has proposed integrating long-term care services with the National Health Insurance system.
By increasing the insurance premium rate by 1 percent, the government would have an additional income of more than NT$100 billion a year to fund the new services, the Ma administration said.
Tsai said that in the initial stage of the implementation of long-term care services, only NT$30 billion of funding would be needed each year, but that the KMT’s plan would require funding of more than NT$100 billion, which she said would lead to a surplus and problems waiting to happen.
A long-term care insurance program as planned by the KMT could also cause long-term care services to become so commercialized that many people would not be able to afford them, Tsai said.
Furthermore, the KMT’s NT$100 billion-worth of funding would be made up of NT$40 billion from the government, NT$30 billion from employers and NT$30 billion from employees.
“The burden will be heavier if a long-term care tax is added to workers,” Tsai said.
Since the government has already planned to allocate between NT$30 billion and NT$40 billion for long-term care services, this should be used to cover expenditures in the initial stage, Tsai said.
The government can wait until a complete long-term care services system is established before beginning its planning of a second-stage financial source, she said.
“This will cause the lightest burden and build the groundwork for long-term care services,” she said.
The gift and inheritance tax was lowered from 50 percent to 10 percent in 2008 by the Ma administration to help persuade wealthy Taiwanese to bring their money back to Taiwan for investment.
The move has caused controversy because much of the capital inflow ended up in the housing market instead of in industry.
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