Plus most foreigners are relatively young and healthy and here for a short time, they are unlikely to be a drain on the health service.
A series of hospital visits making use of expensive machines, hospital overheads. Trips to emergency. Who knows. You get my point.
Bones are creaking,whats that you say young man? My hearing is going, Im so old and been here such a long time I think i need a Hospital visit :discodance:
In addition most foreigners don’t go to the doctor unless they are actually sick.
It would be interesting if they tracked these numbers and could say how much foreigners were benefiting. I have to assume that overall foreigners benefit because it is a great deal but Taiwanese basically abuse the system because it’s cheap.
Where’s the link to the guy’s Facebook page?
Maybe I am way off, but I suspect that many short term foreigners pay into the system and rarely use it. I am sure that foreigners who are here long term use the system.
Maybe I am an exception, but I lived in Taiwan for four years and went to the doctor once.
I am guessing that the average foreigner pays more into the system than he or she gets back.
It’s just easy.
It’s easy to rally people to take something away from foreigners, and even easier when the foreigners are from the Mainland or some Southeast Asian country.
I am guessing that the average foreigner pays more into the system than he or she gets back.[/quote]
You could be completely right and the position I stated a couple of posts ago could be completely wrong. I would like to see more analysis.
I am guessing that the average foreigner pays more into the system than he or she gets back.[/quote]
You could be completely right and the position I stated a couple of posts ago could be completely wrong. I would like to see more analysis.[/quote]
Yes, foreign students pay in more than they take out, but check out this “calculation” from DPP legislators Pan Men-an 潘孟安 and Chen Ting-fei 陳亭妃
Annual premiums for foreign students (NT749/month) NT8988/year
Average annual medical expenses for foreign students NT6200/year
Surplus NT2788
Average annual medical expenses for foreign students NT6200/year plus government subsidy (NT500/month) NT12200/year
Extra burden on Taiwanese citizens NT3212/year
Of course, it is an absurd calculation, because the “government subsidy” of NT500/month just ends up as a surplus in the NHI system. Premiums paid for my foreign students more than cover their medical expenses. But this didn’t stop Pan and Chen advertising their claim that every foreign student is costing Taiwanese taxpayers NT3212/year.
Thanks for providing those numbers (I can’t see the image, sorry) and clearing this up. They’re just playing xenophobic politics.
I am guessing that the average foreigner pays more into the system than he or she gets back.[/quote]
I think that’s probably correct.
I’m no longer young, but I am (touch wood) a lot healthier than nearly all of the locals I know, largely because I protect my health through lifestyle choices (regular exercise, sensible diet, careful driving, no smoking, binge drinking or binlang chewing, etc.). I have certainly paid in at least ten times as much as I’ve ever taken out of the jianbao system. After its inception, I went something like four years before I even used it for the first time. If I hadn’t got married to a Taiwanese woman, and had to occasionally humour her by going to see a doctor when it wasn’t absolutely essential for me to do so, I’d almost certainly have averaged less than one visit to doctor or dentist per year. As it is, I’ve probably averaged close to two, and have paid for all the big stuff myself (NT$90,000 for a tooth implant, NT$45,000 for a health check and scan, NT$40,000 for my daughter’s birth and a hospitalization when she was seriously ill). I am definitely not an NHI leach, and I bet the majority of foreigners here would appear on the same side of the ledger as me.
But those politicians are pandering to a strong vein of xenophobia. It might be just my over-active imagination, but when I do visit a hospital and proffer my NHI card, I sense that some other people there, usually old ones, are eyeing me malignantly and thinking: “Why’s that bloody foreigner here, sucking on our NHI teat? How did he get his hands on that NHI card? It’s not right, it isn’t. Bloody foreigners!”
[quote=“Mawvellous”]
Yes, foreign students pay in more than they take out, but check out this “calculation” from DPP legislators Pan Men-an 潘孟安 and Chen Ting-fei 陳亭妃
Annual premiums for foreign students (NT749/month) NT8988/year
Average annual medical expenses for foreign students NT6200/year
Surplus NT2788
Average annual medical expenses for foreign students NT6200/year plus government subsidy (NT500/month) NT12200/year
Extra burden on Taiwanese citizens NT3212/year
Of course, it is an absurd calculation, because the “government subsidy” of NT500/month just ends up as a surplus in the NHI system. Premiums paid for my foreign students more than cover their medical expenses. But this didn’t stop Pan and Chen advertising their claim that every foreign student is costing Taiwanese taxpayers NT3212/year.[/quote]
Do you have ballpark numbers for the average Taiwanese citizen?
Obviously there is a political motivation to make these statements but I’m guessing that the basis of these comments (and others like Yushan permits) are due to the red ink that these programs are generating and politicians obviously can’t raise premiums on their constituents.
Abacus: Yet foreigners aren’t creating red ink, the locals are. I don’t know what the rationale is though. Make the foreigners pay? What are the relative numbers of foreigners and locals? It would have to be at least twenty locals to each foreigner. The foreigners’ premiums would have to go through the roof to cover those. Under those circumstances, no foreigners would come here, except the tiny, tiny percentage on massive expat packages. So then there wouldn’t be any foreigners (“Woohoo!” cry the local xenophobes), but the red ink from locals would remain (“Doh!” cry the local xenophobes). Typical labour/capital flight.
What does ‘red ink’ mean?
A deficit. Expenditures exceeding receipts.
A deficit. Expenditures exceeding receipts.[/quote]
Indeed. The colour of the ink in the ledger in each case is where we get the phrases “in the black” and “in the red”.
You don’t know what red ink means? It’s a pretty common term.
I’ve heard “in the red” about a hundred times before. But I’ve never heard “red ink”. Urbandictionary has the former but not the latter.