Large crowds gathered on Jan. 11 outside a local human resource and social security bureau in Guangzhou, protesting against a sudden reduction in payments to their personal medical insurance accounts, according to a video of the protest posted online.
This is the most recent protest in a series of mass rallies in the city, the commercial hub in southern China and the seat of Guangdong Province. Some participants told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times that they have been protesting since the payment reductions began in December.
“The government [of Guangzhou] has cut our personal medical insurance by two-thirds since last December, from 484 yuan ($71.35) per month to 160 yuan ($23.59) per month,” Mr. Lin, a resident of Guangzhou, told The Epoch Times.
He only gave his surname for fear of reprisal from the Chinese regime.
Personal medical insurance is a very important financial resource for retirees, who use it to pay for outpatient appointment fees and some medical treatments, tests, scans, and drugs that they purchase from hospitals or pharmacies, among other medical expenses.
Lin said that retirees also protested in front of provincial and municipal government buildings in December.
“We went to Guangdong Provincial Letters and Visits Bureau and the Guangzhou Municipal Healthcare Security Bureau last month, but the officials didn’t come out to meet us,” Lin complained of the authorities treatment of retirees.
Mr. Liu (pseudonym), a retired employee of Guangzhou Alloy Steel Plant, told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times that over 1,000 retirees participated in a protest in front of the Guangzhou Healthcare Security Bureau on Jan. 11.
“We now go twice every week to the offices of letters and visits, demanding that the government return us our money,” Liu said.
As seen in the online videos of the Jan. 11 protest, police vehicles lined up in the street and monitored the protesters closely. More police were seen sitting in buses parked nearby. The police barricaded the protest site with fences. Protesters were negotiating with a man outside the government building in one of the online clips. In one video, a retiree is said to have been beaten by police.
The Epoch Times wasn’t able to verify the authenticity of the videos.
Payment Deductions Illegal: Retirees
Retirees claim that the payments to their personal medical insurance accounts are their private property, as they are paid out of their own contributions and those made by their employers before they retired.Lin said that he had contributed to his medical insurance funds for over 20 years.
“The money in our personal medical insurance accounts is not government appropriation; it’s our own contribution made out of our monthly income,” Lin said, “The government has no right to take our money away from our personal account, which is illegal.”
According to Lin, Guangzhou residents and their employers were required to pay two percent and eight percent, respectively, of an employee’s basic monthly salary to the city’s medical insurance pooling. Retirees had been receiving monthly 484 yuan payments into their personal medical insurance accounts before local authorities changed their policies to reduce the payments.
Liu said that he was forced to pay over 100,000 yuan ($14,700) as social security and medical insurance before he could retire with a retirement pension and medical insurance. “This are private insurance we have purchased with our own money,” Liu said.
Mr. Li (pseudonym), a Guangzhou retiree, blamed the local governments for being unreasonable and violating Chinese law.
“The governments said that our money [personal medical insurance] is a waste as it is only deposited in the bank. They said that they didn’t need to pay us that much as we didn’t use up our deposits, which meant that we didn’t need that much,” Li said angrily.
“Do they also want to take away people’s personal savings in the bank? Can they say that they won’t pay you salaries because you have deposits in the bank?”
Deficits Mounting
Mr. Lin believes that the payments have been reduced because local governments are suffering from financial deficits due to the past three years of zero-COVID policies.“Many enterprises went bankrupt in the past three years due to the lockdowns. How can the government have money when the businesses collapse?” Lin said.
“That said, they can’t just loot money from us vulnerable people,” Lin said, adding that retirees rely on the insurance payments to pay for their daily medical costs.
“In the case of a major disease, who is going to pay for us? Even with 484 yuan paid to us in the past, we could only save 58,080 yuan ($12,061) in ten years on condition that we didn’t spend a cent in the period,” Lin said, “Now with 160 yuan, we can’t even afford N95 face masks.”
The Epoch Times’ multiple calls to the administrative offices of the municipal Healthcare Security Bureau and Human Resources and Social Security Bureau on Jan. 24 were not answered.
But a man who answered a call to the hotline of the Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, who refused to give his name, confirmed that 320 yuan had been cut from the monthly insurance payments to local retirees and that the money belonged to personal accounts. However, he said the action wasn’t illegal.
“It’s not deduction; it’s only reducing the monthly payment to personal accounts, which has been approved by government documents,” he said.
When asked if it was legal to take out of the personal accounts without getting the approval of the owners, the man replied: “If retirees have complaints, I can write them down and report them to relevant [government] departments to take care of.”
