NOW, HOW IN THE FAUCING HELL DOES THIS HAPPEN

Background information on the Japanese Way….

This was touched upon on an earlier post.  I will now go into it more deeply.

Let us begin with the national health care scheme as it was what introduced me to this particular nightmare.  Everyone knows that Japan has a nationalized health care scheme; Japanese know this and so do gaijin who have never set foot on its sacred soil nor even have any intent to do so.  People of all nationalities tend to sing praised for this system whether they have lived here or not.  Like many government programs from probably just about any government on the planet, this is a sure sign that they have not had to deal directly with the programs they think so highly of.   While I have not had direct contact with these, I know many who have and have learned from their experiences to steer well clear of them.

To be able to have the Japanese national health scheme cover the cost of what it may cover, you must be actively paying into it unless you are of retirement age.  If you paid into for any number of years but are unemployed, you are no longer covered unless you continue to make the payments at the city office.  No one knows this until it happened to them are some close enough that they would share this information.  This is even worse than it appears on the surface.  Back when I taught Eikaiwa, one of my students had been the Chief Financial Officer for a major Japanese corporation that all who read this know the name of.  He had a noncancerous tumor in his brain that while non cancerous I am loath to call benign as if not removed, it would have killed him due to encroaching upon the brain’s rightful territory.  His employer designed him leave to get it removed.  So he had to resign.  He was unaware of the need to continue payments on his own and probably not able to anyway.  He had to pay for the entire cost out of pocket.  Same is true if injured at work and they let you go over that.  Yeah!  Worthy of the praise it receives, the Japanese nationalized health care scheme is. I have since learned either directly or obliquely of others who have suffered in similar fashions.  They all found out when trying to pay for the health services they needed that they were no longer covered.  All these I am relating to you are Japanese.  This may account for those I have learned of “suddenly” dying as far as their employer and colleagues knew but in fact had been undergoing treatments for some time before passing.  They may have learned as I did though the experiences of others and knew to keep their health concerns private, though the fact that companies compel full time employees to have periodic health check ups by company employed doctors, I’m have always been amazed that such could be kept secret.  Regardless, much is to be desired by the healthcare payment system here in Japan.

Where this system and the one I most recently posted about, the Pension system, is that these too are well known but how payments are made a closely held secret.  Full time employees in Japan have benefits part timers rarely get, if in fact any do.  These include having all their income tax filings and necessary payments such for as the health care and pension taken care of my their employer’s accountants.  As long as a Japanese national working full time for an employer in Japan has no income other than for work for that company, the employees never even files an income tax return until retirement.  This is true when they are dispatched overseas.  We lowly part timers have to do our own income taxes, which is laughably easy despite being in Japanese compared to the hell of filing US income tax returns.  What part timers often do not know, and this includes Japanese too, that as part timers our employers are most likely not paying making payments to the health care and pension systems on our behalf.  Most find out after they are many years in arrears, such as I and my coworkers, and friends here did.  The pension problem is newer in its severity as it was not enforceable until very recently.  It appears that they are at plaid speed to enforce it now.  According to at least one of the articles I first learned of the pension payments being linked to our visas, two surveys of Japanese found that 1/3 of the recipients of each survey reported that they were not making payments into the pension system either.  From experience through others on health care, I suspect many of these simply thought the payments were being made or taken out of their tax payments.