Former National Health Insurance (NHI) chief executive officer Chu Tzer-ming (朱澤民) yesterday added his voice to a growing chorus calling on the government not to abandon the stalled second-generation health reform plan.
Accompanied by the National Health Insurance Civil Surveillance Alliance, Chu said government officials should not just drop the health plan overnight.
While in office, he and several experts spent years working toward an improved NHI system, he said.
The second-generation plan has been hailed as a more equal system that would resolve the financial troubles that have long plagued the NHI Fund. Discussed for almost a decade, the reform proposal mainly focuses on replacing the current system — which calculates premiums based on an individual’s regular salary — with a premium scheme based on household income.
Under the proposal, households with the same income would pay the same premium regardless of the number of family members.
“The ‘1.5-generation’ health plan [introduced as a possible alternative to the initial reform plan] is only a short-term solution,” Chu said. “The public supports the general spirit of the second-generation health plan, but there are substantial differences of opinion on how the premium rate [is established] and [the sources of] revenue are based.”
The initial reform plan submitted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) failed to pass legislative review last week, prompting its drafters to return to the drawing board. Department of Health Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) presented a new version to the -Executive Yuan and KMT legislators on Monday.
“It is healthy to have a discussion and a debate on what is the best way to reform the National Health Insurance system,” Chu said.
Chu said that while he was in favor of the second-generation health plan, he opposed what has been dubbed “virtual income” — a means by which to calculate the insurance premiums owed by people who are unemployed or have no income by substituting the minimum monthly wage of NT$17,280 into the equation.
Based on what he had heard about the new plan, which is -expected to be made public later this week, the types of income that would be included in the revenue base when calculating premiums would be selective, including professional practice income and interest on deposits, but excluding cash awards and bonuses.
Including one type of income into the premium calculations, but excluding others — when in fact all are income earned by an individual — would make the system more unfair, not less, as it remains unclear on what basis the income types would be chosen, Chu said.
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