Health minister debunks rumors about favoring foreign residents

Asahi Shimbun

18 hours ago

Health minister Takamaro Fukuoka denied the government was giving favorable treatment to foreign residents in medical or welfare services, a rumor that has spread during the Upper House election campaign.
At a news conference on July 15, Fukuoka dismissed three online posts as false.
One was that the number of Chinese welfare recipients has doubled in five years. Another claimed that the amount of national health insurance premiums unpaid by foreigners has reached 400 billion yen ($2.7 billion) a year.
As of July 2023, 9,471 individuals were in households on welfare headed by Chinese nationals, up about 400 from five years earlier, Fukuoka said.
The amount of unpaid national health insurance premiums totaled 145.7 billion yen in fiscal 2022, including those owed by Japanese, according to Fukuoka.
The third bogus post has claimed that the High-Cost Medical Expense Benefit system, which keeps out-of-pocket medical expenses to a certain level even when patients receive high-cost health care, is preferential treatment to foreign residents.
Non-Japanese residents, including those working or studying in Japan for more than three months, are eligible to medical fee caps if they pay national health insurance premiums.
As of the end of fiscal 2023, about 970,000 foreign residents were required to subscribe to the national health insurance program, or 4 percent of the total that includes Japanese.
However, payments to foreign residents under the High-Cost Medical Expense Benefit system accounted for 1.21 percent of the total.
'We are not aware that the percentage of foreign recipients is high,' Fukuoka said.
(This article was written by Ayami Ko and Natsumi Adachi.)