Social Welfare as "Legitimation": National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) and the Politics of Health Reform in South Korea, from 1977 to the Time of COVID-19

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).