Rep. Kim Jung-rok of the Saenuri Party called for the early restructuring of a system of imposing contributions on health insurance policyholders, which has been the subject of complaints among insurance policyholders, particularly the insured a regional basis.
Rep. Kim said, “The number of public grievances and complaints related to the imposition of health insurance contributions reaches as a whopping 57.3 million yearly.”
Many people dispute the imposing of health insurance contributions, so it should undergo a discussion on how to reinvent itself, he said.
Kim expressed the hope that Korea’s health insurance system, albeit globally recognized, will be reborn into a full-fledged global top health insurance system by restructuring the imposing of insurance contributions.
Korea, which began to grow in the 1960s, has made economic strides during the period between the 1970s and the 1980s, but the downside of the economic growth is the widening of income gaps between the rich and the poor and the aging of population. Against this backdrop, the government has turned to the strengthening of social security systems, according to Rep. Kim.
The health insurance system, one of the nation’s important social security regimes, made its debut in Korea in 1963. It was expanded to cover work sites with more than 500 employees in 1977 and the whole of the population in 1989.
The Korean health insurance system has been benchmarked by countries around the world. The reason is that Korea realized an advanced health insurance system, covering everyone within 12 years of its inception, but the United States only achieved that goal recently. The nation’s introduction of the health insurance system not only improved access to people’s medical services by dramatically increasing medical manpower, hospitals and sickbeds, thus raising Koreans’ longevity above the average of OECD countries, but the nation has turned out to shoulder less medical costs than the average of OECD countries, Rep. Kim said.
The problem is that the Korean health insurance system is riddled with loopholes for the calculation of contributions of the insured, Kim said.
The calculation of contributions should be made according to the insured’s financial situation. People with billions of won worth of real estate and some amounts of financial income and pension income are found to not pay contributions if they have chosen to be classified as dependents of the insured, Rep. Kim noted.
Contributions for the insured of worksites are made relatively fairly because they are based on monthly pay or extra income, whereas those of the regionally insured have been found to be unfairly made since they are based on real estate, sex, age and automobile ownership, regardless of their income.
For instance, a mother and two daughters in Songpa-dong, southeastern Seoul who resorted to a collective suicide, shouldered about 50,000 won even though they had no income, he said.
At the time of the design of the health insurance system, the nation lacked data to calculate contributions income data collection ratio for the regionally insured accounting for 10 percent, so it set such criteria according to real estate, age and sex. Things have now changed. Income data is available for more than 80 percent of the insured, including the regionally insured, and the figure could rise to 95 percent if data from the National Tax Service is counted.
The health insurance system, established 28 years ago, has failed to reflect social changes, and now is the time when the calculation of contributions needs to be based on income. Against this backdrop, the Park Geun-hye government has set the calculation of contributions based on income as a national agenda priority. Early this year, the government postponed a plan to revamp the calculation system, which could have an impact on just about everyone, so it should be made in a sincere and precise manner in consideration of such things as public consensus, feasibility of execution, and financial situations, Rep. Kim said.
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