Welfare ministry promises to consider reducing or exempting fees for low-income earners' medical treatment

Japan Press Weekly

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Welfare ministry promises to consider reducing or exempting fees for low-income earners' medical treatment

The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has announced that it is examining ways to financially support local governments in order to ensure that low-income earners with national health insurance cards can receive necessary treatment even if they cannot afford to pay the patient's share of the cost at hospitals.

This was in response to a request made by Japanese Communist Party representative Koike Akira at the House of Councilors Welfare Committee meeting on June 18 that the government take measures so that more national health insurance card carriers can use a system of exemption or reduction of the patient share of costs for medical services.

Currently, municipalities may reduce the patient share of medical costs for those who have difficulty in paying it. However, without national criteria for such a measure, about half of the nation's municipalities do not offer a system of exemption and reduction of the patient share of medical costs due to their fiscal limitations.

The ministry will soon issue new national criteria and carry them out on a trial basis, and then implement them across the nation from next April.

- Akahata, June 25, 2009