Newly-appointed Youth and Sports Minister Zainudin Amali — the first in over a decade not to sport a mustache — has a solution of his own to help solve the BPJS Kesehatan (Health Care and Social Security Agency) deficit crisis, and it involves all of us getting off of our couches.
Earlier this week, President Joko Widodo signed a presidential regulation (Perpres) doubling the premiums for the BPJS national health insurance program, which is expected to run up a IDR28 trillion (US$1.99 billion) deficit this year. The premium hike is going to take effect on Jan. 1, 2020.
In conjunction with the hike, Minister Zainudin said that his ministry is going to come up with programs to encourage citizens to exercise.
“The government will be able to cover debts, and the BPJS deficit will be reduced if the public is healthy,” he said yesterday, as quoted by CNN Indonesia.
Admittedly, that is a sound argument, but Zainudin went on to say something that may come across as undervaluing Indonesians’ penchant for exercise.
“Day by day, people are becoming increasingly lazy to exercise,” he said, without citing any data.
We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s been too busy in his first days in office to look across the street from the Youth and Sports Ministry building to the Gelora Bung Karno (GBK) sports complex and see how the facility never fails to be filled with tireless Jakartans squeezing exercise into their hectic daily lives.
At any rate, any program that encourages more exercise is always welcome. As for the problem of the BPJS deficit, another government policy that seems to make more sense in reducing the number of Indonesians requiring medical care is the recent tobacco excise hike, which will go into effect next year.
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