The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the nation’s medical system must be bolstered to shoulder disease prevention duties ranging from border controls to aiding local communities, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said.
Chen, who heads the Central Epidemic Command Center, made the remarks in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) on Friday.
Disease prevention efforts should not have to erode the provision of medical resources to the public, Chen said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
A majority of Taiwan’s medical industry is in private hands and benign competition keeps the industry at peak efficiency, he said.
“However, being overly efficient might become a problem during pandemics, as the extra work — piled on an already heavy workload — lowers the original capability the industry could have offered,” Chen said.
Giving an example, Chen said the US medical system is strong and efficient, but as can be seen during the pandemic, most of it has closed down, collapsing under the weight of epidemic prevention, an influx of COVID-19 patients and other severe illnesses.
Likewise, Taiwan’s medical system is wound too tight and its focus on peak efficiency would mean that when the time comes, its peak performance would be insufficient, Chen said.
One method of resolving this issue is to boost government involvement, Chen said, adding: “We must leave room to do more, when it is necessary.”
Regarding the improvement of disease prevention institutions, Hospital and Social Welfare Organizations Administration Commission Director Wang Pi-Sheng (王必勝) said that besides sufficient funding and staff, public hospitals are in urgent need of systemic reforms.
Public hospitals are comprised of ministry-operated hospitals, military hospitals, veterans’ hospitals, university-affiliated hospitals, and county or city hospitals, but they cannot collaborate, as they operate under different hierarchies, he said.
If these could be integrated or grouped under an independent bureau-level organization, their overall efficiency would increase, Wang said.
Turning to the issue of overseas Taiwanese visiting Taiwan to use the nation’s medical resources, while a majority of COVID-19 cases having been imported from abroad, Chen said that most coronavirus patients are being treated using state funding and are not related to the National Health Insurance (NHI) program.
However, the pandemic has highlighted a problem in the NHI system, which is insufficient funding, he said.
Some have called for raising NHI premiums, but they must realize that there would be a certain amount of wastage, as the NHI uses a third-party payment system, Chen said.
For some, the waste is intentional, but for others, it is an institutional problem, he said, adding that if the premiums are raised too much, it would hurt those who have done nothing wrong.
Whether the system should be changed and what changes need to be made should be discussed, he added.
Additional reporting by Lin Hui-chin
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS