With the perceived “success” of its K-COVID approach, relying heavily on the use of contact tracing, South Korea has received extensive praise since 2020. In part, this perception also extends to health coverage (NHIS), for which the nation has provided universal coverage since the late 1980s. This article re-examines the politics of Korean health care, looking at the circumstances under which the coverage was first adopted. At the time, it was enormously controversial, and there was a great deal of debate about how the government might pay for the system. Its cost-cutting measures continue to influence care (e.g. multiple beds per room) in ways that influence recent disease outbreaks such as MERS (2015) and COVID (2020-present).
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Challenging the Narrative through COVIDThe publicity associated with COVID-19, and more specifically, the diverse methods through which various governments have responded to the pandemic, has occupied much of the past four years (February 2020-present). For scholars of East Asia, the outbreak has brought unexpected attention to medical practice, whether in terms of indigenous forms of treatment, “Western” medicine or biomedicine, and any number of practices falling within this broad spectrum (DiMoia Citation2020). Aside from the issue of varied responses to the pandemic, one of the related questions gaining the most attention has been the history of public health in East Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan), and specifically, how these diverse polities have approached questions of social medicine and public outreach, whether individually or collectively (Hyun and Sumida Citation2020). For South Korea, debates about its National Health Insurance Service (NHIS), roughly thirty years old (1989), have re-emerged in the context of international praise for the Korean health system (Kim Citation2022; NHIS). If its “K- COVID” approach received numerous questions through the second and third years of the crisis (2021–2023), the South Korean health system has nonetheless maintained relatively low case numbers, and especially, limited the number of deaths (Brazinsky Citation2020).
