Remember Bill Kapoun: Enrollment for National Medical Insurance Program
by Brendon Carr
Last week, news that Bill Kapoun, a handsome young English teacher, and his girlfriend had been burned in a house fire swept the expat community here in Seoul. A lot of people—including my family—opened up their purses to donate funds for his staggering medical expenses, as Bill Kapoun was not enrolled in Korea’s National Medical Insurance Program.
The Korea Times and Korea Herald both covered this story of profound interest to the English-teaching community, whose members are often not insured themselves.
Sadly, Bill Kapoun died Sunday morning after a week in intensive care and an array of skin-graft operations intended to keep him alive and stable enough to be transferred by medevac to a burn unit in Chicago.
Why is this relevant to you? There are a lot of differences in how Korean society treats foreigners in comparison to nationals, but access to the National Medical Insurance Program operated by the government is not one of them. If you’re not insured, you don’t have to stay that way.
All lawful foreign residents are permitted—indeed, obligated—to subscribe (except for some well-remunerated foreign investors who can opt out if they have a global insurance plan). This means all English teachers on E-2 visas, students at Korean universities, industrial trainees, and so forth. I have heard, but don’t know for certain, that even illegal residents are also permitted to subscribe.
In respect of full-time employees, the law requires employers to pay half the premiums for National Medical Insurance Program subscriptions; employees bear the other half. Full-time employees are anyone who works 15 hours or more per month. Their employers pay half, they pay half. Part-timers are not excluded from the scope of coverage—part-timers just have to bear all the premiums themselves if their employer doesn’t voluntarily pay up.
Just because your employer wants to dodge the expense of bearing the employer portion (half) of the National Medical Insurance Program premiums (usually something trivial like thirty bucks a month—half of sixty), you can still subscribe for insurance at your local district office (gu, shi, or gun).
The National Health Insurance Corporation (NHIC) has an English-language website, and an English-language helpline at (02) 390-2000. There is also a comprehensive English-language brochure available at the NHIC website which explains most aspects of the program. Because this is Korea, the brochure is well-hidden on the NHIC website and its prose is not always as clear as one would like—but it’s a substantial effort to communicate with foreign residents of Korea.
Since the brochure is hard to find at the NHIC site, I’ve downloaded it and placed it on my Korea Law Blog—you can click here (Adobe Acrobat PDF, 2.27Mb) to download it for yourself.
And yes—everyone should also carry a supplemental accident and health insurance policy from a private insurer like AIG. The National Medical Insurance Program covers just half the cost of most surgeries, and many things—like Bill’s multiple skin-graft surgeries, at W15,000,000 each—are not covered at all. Without a supplemental policy, the costs of a catastrophic incident can reach the stratosphere.
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Good information. I didn’t know that 15 hours is the rule for making someone a part-timer—what recourse would someone have if they discover, as I once did, that they’ve been registered as a part-timer despite working over twice those hours?
I hope, as probably many others do, that Bill’s legacy can be better awareness of these issues. RIP.
Any time a hagwon owner gets tricky on his employees, the thing to do is to proceed to the National Labor Relations Commission to double-check things. The labor inspectors there are not messing around: I represent multinational corporations, and their HR departments are terrified of the NLRC.
Brendon, Thanks for this important and valuable post. I hope it is widely read. I particularly appreciate the supplemental insurance advice. As I have belatedly learned, the Korean government health payment system does not cover many things that would routinely be covered in the U.S. (e.g. many diagnostic tests such as MRIs) and provides only 50% coverage for other things that would be completed covered (after a deductible) in the U.S.
“And yes—everyone should also carry a supplemental accident and health insurance policy from a private insurer like AIG.”
Too bad when the jackasses at AIG Korea turn away foreigners applying for insurance. “We are not for foreigners,” is roughly what they tried to tell me. After a couple of hours of badgering the shit out of them, I eventually got through to someone who knew they could in fact insure me, but that doesn’t change the fact that their initial response was to, typically, claim the scary foreigner is out of his mind expecting service from them.
babotaengi,
Insurance companies work through agents—if you call the company directly you might get the runaround, and if you get the wrong agent you might get the runaround. Since this is Korea, and the company and its agents are staffed by Korean people, if you call up wanting to talk things over in English you are going to get the runaround.
Foreign residents of Korea can indeed subscribe for private supplemental insurances. I’m working on some ways to make it easier.
Never even dreamt about talking things over in English with them - I’m not that bold. But I get the rest of your point. I wasn’t really surprised. I just knew that they were speaking out of ignorance only. Just thought others should know: when they tell you they can’t cover you they are wrong, and if you press them they will soon be forced to discover this fact.
One thing I’ve personally learned over my 12 years in Korea is that whenver someone says you ‘can’t’ do something that you should be able to do...they are usually wrong or just trying to keep their job simple.
“That’s impossible” = “It’s really difficult and I’d have to look up how to do it and I’d rather you just go away and leave me to play my computer games at work”
I just got my second policy through [an insurance company] today.
The first policy is a basic supplementary medical. At the time of purchase (a year or so back) an agent came to the house, standard stuff. Overall a stress-free experience.
THIS time, I was trying to buy a Cancer policy (long story, I’m healthy, just paranoid) and lo and behold, the policy could ONLY be sold via one outlet...no we didn’t have to travel cross town, or cross country, no it wasn’t the Internet, and no, a specific agent didn’t come to us…
Get this, (supposedly) they changed their regs and will ONLY sell by......TELEPHONE!!!
What the bloody heck! So they have to READ the policy via phone (in Korean, of course), and I have to answer in Korean to their questions (phrased in Korean medical jargon and insurance-speak).
My wife finally calmed me down enough so we could be the freaking policy, but for the love of all that breathes, how could you possibly get more messed up?
What if a customer were deaf? They wouldn’t be able to purchase the policy. What if they have a low tolerance for idiocy...wait that’s me, and if not for my wife I would have been throwing furniture throught the phone lines at the [insurance company] rep.
I’m sorely tempted to contact someone about this insanity, but don’t know where to begin.
My husband works for ING, speaks English, and is willing to help. Foreigners need insurance! Anyway, he’s been helping out a lot of foreigners since this tragedy. ING does not offer contracts in English, but the coverage does not differ from Koreans to foreigners. He has researched this thoroughly. Send me e-mail if you’d like to get insurance from ING.
I met with Sarah’s husband today and found him to be quite proficient in English and very professional and helpful. Among other things, he has taken initiative by himself to provide in written English information that would otherwise be available only in Korean. I don’t know yet whether my private insurance needs will be met through ING, but I can recommend others exploring their options to try contacting Sarah’s husband.
I’ll second that recommendation, Dave. Although I’ve not met the guy, he’s written me separately about this issue. In a market where others report that the phone gets slammed down on them as soon as it’s discovered they’re foreign, it’s good to know that there is an insurance agent who will go the extra mile to serve what is—after all—not a very large community of resident foreigners.