Welcome to BASE21

Recently, National Health Insurance Corporation announcedthat it borrowed over fifty billions Won from two major banks and a security company by issuing CP to pay for its employees' pay rolls. The serious fiscal depletion in health insurance fund will bring the Corporation to repeat the same action in future months, they added.
It triggered Kim Won Gil, the Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Welfare to produce effective measures to stabilize the seriously deteriorated fund crisis, and the comprehensive plan to ensure fiscal balance of health insurance fund was laid out in late May.

However, many experts doubt about the effectiveness and timing of the plan. A recent survey by Chosun Weekly shows that top leading authorities in Medicare are skeptical about the measure will be helpful in stabilizing the fiscal crisis in health insurance fund. Kim Han Jung, Chief of Health School at Yonsei University pointed out that raising nie percent insurance fee in yearly basis cannot meet the fiscal balance of the fund, considering the fact average rate of insurance pay raised was 18.5 percent during last five years.

In reaction to the government's stabilization plan, two major interpretations about what caused the fiscal crisis has been raised between two groups. Most experts claim the government has overlooked fundamental problem. In regards to the pending fiscal depletion in healthcare fund, they pointed the fingers at the premature integration measure of the Regional Medicare Corporations and Workplace Medicare into a health insurance category enacted in 2000 as a main source that brought the current crisis.
The measure conducted in 2000 integrated the regional Medicare corporations and workplace ones into a health insurance system, and its goal was to relieve the coverage fee of low-income employees while increase the burden of the high-income ones. As a result a uniform standard for coverage price was conducted the entire nation. But the equity goal faced a harsh criticism after watching a year's achievement. Most said that the ideal doesn't fit for the reality.
According to Kim Jong Dae, the former high official in the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the regional Medicare corporations had maintained a sound fiscal condition (saved over 88 billions Won by 1997). In 1998 when those regional insurance corporations were integrated, however, the fund began to face a deficit despite the coverage fee had been raised by 18.5 percent point. When it comes to Workplace Medicare, it also could save 260 billions Won by 1996, but started to repeat a deficit cycle since 1997, he added.
In a recent published book titled " The Third Way to Secure Medicare", he asserted that all of these bad results are due to the premature integration of the Regional and Workplace Medicare corporations.

Meanwhile, People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, which had long been pursued for enacting the integration measure, claims that raising coverage fee will necessarily result in increasing citizen's tax. Also, to produce a common action PSPD formed a joint force with fifteen other groups including civil groups, farmers associations and labor unions.
PSPD interpreted the main source of the fiscal depletion of the health care fund was the sharp increase in insurance fee by the government, and it urged that the government should be responsible for the cost of the policy failure. No burden accrued from the policy failure should be transferred to the citizen, the group added.

by Hyunkyung Kang(hpfrast@dreamwiz.com)