{"id":369623,"date":"2025-12-24T21:33:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T21:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/369623\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T21:33:15","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T21:33:15","slug":"japanese-ministers-agree-to-raise-medical-service-fees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/369623\/","title":{"rendered":"Japanese ministers agree to raise medical service fees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama and health minister Kenichiro Ueno agreed Wednesday to raise medical service fees by 2.22% in fiscal 2026, the first increase in 12 years.<\/p>\n<p>Katayama and Ueno agreed to increase the main portion of the fees, which mainly cover labor costs for medical workers, by an annual average of 3.09% over the two years from the fiscal year starting next April, while lowering official drug prices by 0.87%.<\/p>\n<p>The core portion of the fees will be raised by 3% or more for the first time in 30 years, a step designed to help hospitals cope with rising prices and raise wages for medical workers.<\/p>\n<p>The two ministers also agreed to raise the maximum monthly out-of-pocket medical expenses by some 7% to 38%, depending on income, as early as August next year.<\/p>\n<p>They also agreed to set annual upper limits for medical expenses to help those undergoing long-term treatment. For the average annual income bracket of 3.7 million to \u00a57.7 million, the annual maximum will be \u00a5530,000.<\/p>\n<p>The government will also raise fees paid to nursing care service providers by 2.03% and those for disability welfare services by 1.84%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama and health minister Kenichiro Ueno agreed Wednesday to raise medical service fees by 2.22%&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,137,500,19900,5465,62062,4848],"class_list":["post-369623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-hospitals","tag-inflation","tag-national-health-care","tag-wages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}