Frontline healthcare workers should be on the National Health Insurance Committee, the Taiwan Medical Alliance for Labor Justice and Patient Safety said yesterday, urging the National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) to include them.
The fifth list of committee members was released on Friday last week, consisting of 39 members from four groups: representatives of “the insured,” “healthcare service providers,” “government officials” and “specialists and trusted third parties.”
Alliance director-general Lin Ping-hung (林秉鴻) said that although half of the committee members are new to the list, it continued to exclude healthcare workers, so decisions are made by a “tripartite agreement” of the government, healthcare facility management and people who have National Health Insurance coverage.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
“If frontline healthcare workers are not included in the National Health Insurance Committee, the sweat and blood situation of healthcare labor will not improve,” Taiwan Anesthesia Union chairman Chu Ning-wei (儲寧瑋) said.
The naming of committee members is done following the National Health Insurance Act (全民健保法), but the “healthcare service providers” are all top officials of hospital associations or medical superintendents, so “management” is represented, but workers are not, Chu said.
As academics are not on the front line, sometimes they cannot feel the pain of a tough work situation, so they might propose impractical policies, Lin said.
The NHIA must include at least one representative of frontline healthcare workers on the committee, Lin said.
Alliance director Tseng Chia-lin (曾家琳) said that the committee is responsible for allocating nearly NT$800 billion (US$28.1 billion), or about what the government collects each year in income tax, but it is not monitored by the Legislative Yuan and its members only have to be approved by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
The act must be amended to require committee members to be nominated by the premier and approved by legislators, Tseng said, adding that they should also be required to declare conflicts of interest and properties.
Moreover, meetings should be open to the public, she said.
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) today issued a sea warning for Typhoon Fung-wong effective from 5:30pm, while local governments canceled school and work for tomorrow. A land warning is expected to be issued tomorrow morning before it is expected to make landfall on Wednesday, the agency said. Taoyuan, and well as Yilan, Hualien and Penghu counties canceled work and school for tomorrow, as well as mountainous district of Taipei and New Taipei City. For updated information on closures, please visit the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration Web site. As of 5pm today, Fung-wong was about 490km south-southwest of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan's southernmost point.
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A magnitude 5.3 earthquake struck Kaohsiung at 1pm today, the Central Weather Administration said. The epicenter was in Jiasian District (甲仙), 72.1km north-northeast of Kaohsiung City Hall, at a depth of 7.8km, agency data showed. There were no immediate reports of damage. The earthquake's intensity, which gauges the actual effects of a temblor, was highest in Kaohsiung and Tainan, where it measured a 4 on Taiwan's seven-tier intensity scale. It also measured a 3 in parts of Chiayi City, as well as Pingtung, Yunlin and Hualien counties, data showed.
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