The Health and Welfare Ministry says it is going to improve controls over medical payments. The government is experiencing a rapid increase in costs, and ministry says it urgently needs to prevent excessive treatment and abuse. It says it is going to ascertain who are going to hospitals and pharmacies with particular frequency and keep an eye on them, and that it plans on engaging in inquiries designed to prevent medical institutions from treating people excessively.
If you look at the facts, there clearly does need to be an improvement. However, policy that talks only about the need to reduce costs is a problem. The focus has to be guaranteeing the poor stable and effective medical care. The system is supposed to provide people without the ability to work, persons awarded for their meritous service to the state, disaster victims, North Korean defectors, and others in difficult circumstances with medical expenses. As of the end of last year there were 996,000 citizens receiving all of their expenses, and 760,000 people receiving only partial expenses. 25 percent are over the age of 65. Last year the government paid W3.1765 trillion in payments, a 60 percent increase over 2002, when it issued W1.9824 in payments.
Which is why the government wants to reduce cases of excessive treatments, but while there clearly are going to be cases of excess and abuse, the main reason for the increase is that there are better benefits for persons with rare, incurable, and chronic diseases and because of a rise in the elderly population. In other words, the key problem is a structural one. Furthermore, there is a serious problem with the inability of poor citizens to receive the treatment they need because hospitals discriminate and try to avoid qualifying them for payments.
Improving the system, therefore, has to focus on the question of how to deal with costs that will inevitably rise because of socioeconomic disparity and an aging society, and on the question of how to improve the quality of medical care. That being the case the approach needs to be a long-term and comprehensive one. For example, it would be worth considering integrating the system with the national health insurance system and adopting a family doctor program. Integration with the health insurance system would not be a simple matter, but the experts say it would have various advantages such as less discrimination against the poor and increased efficiency. A family doctor program would present problems of cost and balance, but if you could still approach it as health maintenance for the poor by including those just above the income level that qualifies people for welfare.
It is critical that we have the mentality that society should share the burden for providing universal medical care for all its members. Improving the medical care system needs to move forward based on this larger principle.
The Hankyoreh, 28 April 2006.
[Translations by Seoul Selection]
[Editorial] Improving Quality of Medical Care for Poor |
