Yoshio Mitsumori07.20.06
The goal of the reform plan is to help maintain Japan’s unique universal healthcare coverage system in the future and provide fair and equal medical opportunities for all Japanese citizens—even as the social environment continues its rapid evolution due to the growing elderly population and increasingly lower fertility rates.
Following are some of the main objectives of the reform plan:
1. To ensure the promotion of health and preventive measures, the healthcare delivery system will be reorganized in a manner that offers truly reliable and high-quality medical services. This will be accomplished through information disclosure at healthcare facilities, a wide selection of choices for patients, functional centralization/decentralization of medical institutes and so on.
2. To materialize a reliable healthcare delivery system, the healthcare remuneration system will be restructured in a way that adequately reflects fair and reasonable cost assessment of medical technology and hospital operation.
3. Under the idea of a universal coverage system, the health insurance system will be restructured to accomplish the fair and reasonable balance of benefit and burden among each insurance organization and all the generations of patients they serve. By means of reorganization and/or consolidation of insurance organizations, a stable and maintainable healthcare system will be explored.
4. To cope with the rapidly growing elderly population and increasing medical expenditure, fair burden will be accomplished among generations of all ages. Particularly for elderlies over 75 years of age, a prioritized measure with a higher public burden will be introduced and reduce the burden of active insurers.
5. Together with the elderly healthcare insurance system, the nursing care system will be reviewed, with special consideration given to cross-linking medical and nursing care services.
As a whole, the basic design of the reform plan is reportedly not so friendly to the elderly in terms of fair burden. In reality, enactment of this reform bill will hit the elderly hard. For example, co-payment for patients older than 70 years with annual income more than 5.2 million Yen will increase from 20% to 30% in October 2006; in fiscal 2008, the co-payment for patients 70 to 74 years of age will increase from 10% to 20%.