Doctors to stage rally against 'Moon Jae-in care'

By Lee Kyung-min

A group of doctors plan to stage a rally Saturday to protest the recently revised healthcare plan announced by President Moon Jae-in, under which about 3,800 treatments will be insured under the National Health Insurance Service (NHIS), they said Wednesday.

Many doctors have profited by recommending expensive procedures including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound, something a sick person cannot afford to refuse.

Doctors who run small- to medium-sized clinics say their practices will definitely go bankrupt because patients will stop coming to them if the government pays the additional fees needed to see doctors at university-run, large hospitals. This, they claim, will result in significant decreases in their revenue.

Their fear is based on an element of the revision, under which the government will remove “selective treatment.” This is an option for which a patient has to pay an additional 50 percent of the medical fees to get a professional opinion from doctors with over 10 years of experience, most of whom work at big medical centers. The government is likely to pay the additional fees.

They say their practices will further suffer given that small- and medium-sized clinics depend heavily on uninsured treatments, for up to 50 percent of their revenue, while large hospitals have depend on less than 25 percent of their revenue.

“Doctors can recommend treatment only to patients that come to clinics. If most of the patients go to large hospitals, most of us will have to shut our practices down,” said a doctor who runs a clinic in Jongno, Seoul, on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, former chairman of Korean Medical Association Roh Hwan-kyu said the revision is only a populist political show, as no concrete measure was drawn up to protect doctors’ interests.

“Let’s say treating a patient costs 1,000 won ($0.88), then doctors get paid only 696 won,” he said on his blog. “The unilateral revision forces doctors to sacrifice. What is this if not an abuse of power by the incumbent administration?”

Roh said, under the current system, the doctors are unable to make money by seeing a patient, performing surgery, administering a shot or admitting a patient. The more they perform such treatments, the more their revenue decreases.

The only way for them to make money is through having patients undergo high-tech medical equipment-administered examinations or treatments.

“If the government continues to ignore concerns from the medical community, the public will have to endure the consequences,” he said.

His comment is in line with doctors’ opposition to the revision which they say will bring down the quality of medical service as a whole, because they would end up caring less about the conditions of individual patients but more about how many they treat.

They would be tempted to resort to other means to increase profits such as using low quality treatment materials.

Meanwhile, the President said the revision is crucial to prevent household bankruptcy caused by heavy medical costs.

Under the plan, the government will spend 30.6 trillion won ($27.2 billion) by 2022 to reduce out-of-pocket household medical spending to less than 30 percent.

According to 2014 data from The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), out-of-pocket household medical spending in Korea was the second most expensive after Mexico.

where households have to pay more than 40 percent of the costs. Koreans pay more than twice the OECD average (19.6 percent).

The government said it would use about 10 trillion won, almost half of the 21 billion won profit made from running the NHIS thus far, adding it would maintain the policy of raising the national health insurance rate by up to 3.2 percent every year.