What to do about Health Insurance during 6-month NHI waiting period?

[Andrew]

@citizen86

They don’t need to be in Taiwan for those 6 months?

@Satellite_TV

They cannot enter then just leave and get NHI. They have to reside in Taiwan for 6 months first. If they leave they have to start again. This prevents grifters from abusing the healthcare system. Aged people often have medical condition.

I’m wondering whether there might be some subtleties here based on the status of the parents? I get the impression from OP’s first post that the parents are Taiwanese nationals who have been abroad for a long time but previously had household registration. Does the six-month waiting period definitely apply here too?

I can’t be bothered spending loads of time reading through NHI regulations at the moment, but maybe Article 8 of the National Health Insurance Act and this previous thread (there are probably more threads too) might be relevant?

https://law.moj.gov.tw/ENG/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode=L0060001

Problem with stopping NHI having left/re-entered Taiwan

Some of you may be aware that Taiwanese nationals have to apply for their NHI to be canceled when they leave Taiwan, and upon re-entry, their NHI will be automatically renewed for a period of three months. As foreigners, we need to also apply for the NHI to be canceled when we leave the country, but the (dreadful) NHI website says that foreigners need to actually apply for the reactivation of NHI when they re-enter Taiwan if they’ve already canceled it on departure. My wife stopped our whole fa…

I lived in Taiwan for a few years before getting NHI (admittedly I wasn’t 80+ years old at the time), and I got the impression that local plans providing comprehensive health insurance as an alternative to NHI (as opposed to supplementary plans offering additional benefits) aren’t that common.

I don’t remember reading of any anyway, and I did look into it a couple of times. I guess there’s not that much of a market for plans like that. There are international health insurance plans of course, like @jimbob132 mentioned, as well as travel insurance plans that might cover some emergency stuff, but I can’t imagine they’d be cheap for octogenarians (possibly also more expensive when applying from the U.S.?).