The Taiwan Health Reform Foundation yesterday started a petition for the government to abolish regulations that discontinue individuals’ National Health Insurance (NHI) for non-payment.
The foundation said it has recently received many reports of people who cannot pay their NHI bills and had their insurance cut off. Since some families rely on a single wage earner for the whole family’s health insurance, this often results in the entire -family being unable to receive prompt healthcare, said Huang Chiang-hsiang (黃經祥), deputy director of the foundation’s research and development department.
Huang said that even though the Bureau of National Health Insurance (BNHI) is lenient on specific individuals, including families in poverty, young people under 18 years of age and victims of -domestic violence, the BNHI could do better by ceasing to disable NHI cards altogether.
“The BNHI should enforce debt collection for those who -maliciously refuse to pay their NHI bills, rather than disabling NHI cards for those in poverty before finding out the reason for their delayed payments,” Huang said.
The foundation said that there were currently about 370,000 -people in the country who, for various reasons, had NHI cards that were not valid because they could not afford to pay their health insurance premiums.
That means when those individuals become sick, they face the additional financial burden of being unable to receive medical care under the NHI system.
About 600,000 people owe money to the NHI system. About half have owed at least NT$7,500 for more than three months and have not paid their premiums when encouraged to do so by health authorities. As a result, their NHI cards have been invalidated.
While the proposed second-generation health insurance bill stipulates that NHI cards cannot be canceled when people are in certain dire circumstances, such as living in shelters as a result of domestic violence, the bill has yet to be passed.
The foundation urged the Department of Health, as it pushes for the passage of the second-generation health insurance bill, to do away with the disabling of NHI cards for people who owe money to protect the rights of disadvantaged groups.
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