The Diet has passed a law to rescue some 33,000 children of middle school age or younger who are not covered by health insurance because their parents defaulted on premium payments to the National Health Insurance system (Kokumin Kenko Hoken) administered by municipalities. The new law, however, fails to cover high school students without health insurance and adults who cannot afford to pay premiums.
If people fail to pay insurance premiums for one year or longer, municipalities take away their health insurance certificates and issue them "entitlement certificates." These require the holders to pay medical fees in total — not just the 30 percent that insured people pay — then wait several months for 70 percent of their costs to be refunded. About 330,000 households have been issued "entitlement certificates."
Some teachers, though, have reported cases in which sick students refuse to go to doctors, saying that doing so would put their parents in financial trouble.