The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday said the government’s “long-term care services program 2.0,” is ill-prepared and the idea of using substitute service draftees in long-term care service institutions is “mindless.”
The Executive Yuan launched pilots of the scheme in nine cities and counties on Tuesday.
The KMT caucus said that the project is short of financial and human resources, has not been promoted properly and that the institutions involved with the pilots are ill-prepared.
It also questioned the impartiality of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) coordination meeting and its capability of executing the policy nationwide, saying that only officials from Democratic Progressive Party-run counties and cities were invited to attend.
KMT Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) said the extra staff and services pledged under the auspices of the “long-term care service program 2.0” have not materialized.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare has also not explained how the project’s goal of a caregiver to patient ratio of one to 200 can be achieved, with the current ratio standing at one to 400, Wang said.
She also criticized the ministry’s plan to ask at least 1,000 substitute military service draftees to work in long-term care service institutions.
“It a mindless plan, as draftees born after 1995 are only required to serve in the military for four months. How are they going to become qualified caregivers — for whom professionalism and stability is of the upmost importance?” Wang said.
On the first day of the pilot project an elderly person asked how much money he could receive from the program, in the belief that the new project would be another annuity-granting social-welfare scheme, KMT Legislator Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said.
This shows that the government’s promotion of the scheme has been insufficient, he said.
If the issue of caregivers working in low-paid jobs without any prospects of promotion is not resolved, the industry would not be able to attract young people, he 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:
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