To select English subtitles, click on the Settings icon located at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, then click on the option labeled "subtitles/CC," and finally choose the English language option.

Video Description

Type: KIHASA LOOK IT Series Shorts

Topic: Why is the National Health Insurance mired in an equity issue?

Guest Speaker: Kang Hee-jung, Director, Department of Health Care Policy Research

Transcript

The National Health Insurance in Korea is a system in which all citizens contribute to the funding based on their "ability to pay." These funds are then used to ensure that every insured individual has equal access to healthcare services, without any discrimination.

In principle, everyone, regardless of their employment type, should be subject to contributing to the system in proportion to their income, namely, in accordance with their "ability to pay."

In the 2000s, however, when the National Health Insurance as we know it was first introduced with its coverage encompassing workplace-based subscribers and individual-based subscribers, the percentage of self-employed workers whose income was verified remained low.

That is how, for want of other options, individual-based subscribers were made subject to contribution payment based on this newly created "assessed income" base, which facotrs in their income, property, cars, etc., when workplace-based subscribers were paying their contributions in amounts calculated based on their average monthly salary.

The fact that these two different contribution bases are applied to two different groups of insureds within the same system has been the source of the persisting controversy over equity.