South Korea’s pilot sickness benefit program, launched in 2022 across six regions and currently operating in 14 regions as of 2025, represents a critical juncture in the country’s social protection development. While ostensibly designed with inclusive eligibility criteria, the program reveals fundamental paradoxes that illuminate deeper structural inequalities within Korea's dualized labor market. This opinion piece examines how current design choices risk undermining universal health coverage goals by systematically excluding the most precarious workers. The program’s design features—including low replacement rates (60% of the minimum wage) and extended waiting periods—created perverse incentives where the most vulnerable workers accepted the least favorable conditions. This pattern exemplifies what Korpi and Palme termed the “paradox of redistribution,” where targeted approaches ultimately prove less effective than universal ones, with the second phase’s restriction to the bottom 50% income bracket threatening to exacerbate this paradox. Successful implementation will depend on integrating equity, people-centered design, and gender-transformative perspectives into every phase—design, operation, evaluation, and reform. In doing so, South Korea has the opportunity to offer a model of sickness protection that does not simply patch gaps, but actively reshapes the structures that produce health and economic inequalities in the first place.

Objectives: This study explored the effect of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on psychosocial stress in prime working-age individuals in Korea, focusing on gender inequalities. We hypothesized that the impact of COVID-19 on mental health would differ by age and gender, with younger women potentially demonstrating heightened vulnerability relative to men. Methods: The study involved data from the Korea Community Health Survey and included 319 592 adults aged 30 years to 49 years. We employed log-binomial regression analysis, controlling for variables including age, education, employment status, marital status, and the presence of children. The study period included 3 phases: the period prior to the COVID-19 outbreak (pre–COVID-19), the early pandemic, and the period following the introduction of vaccinations (post-vaccination). Results: The findings indicated that women were at a heightened risk of psychosocial stress during the early pandemic (relative risk [RR], 1.01; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.98 to 1.05) and post-vaccination period (RR, 1.07; 95% CI, 1.04 to 1.10) compared to men. This pattern was prominent in urban women aged 30-34 years (pre–COVID-19: RR, 1.06; 95% CI, 1.02 to 1.10; early pandemic: RR, 1.16; 95% CI, 1.08 to 1.25; post-vaccination period, RR, 1.22; 95% CI, 1.14 to 1.31). Conclusions The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted unequal impacts on psychosocial stress among prime working-age individuals in Korea, with women, particularly those in urban areas, experiencing a heightened risk. The findings highlight the importance of addressing gender-specific needs and implementing appropriate interventions to mitigate the psychosocial consequences of the pandemic.

The study seeks to widen the discussion from healthcare oriented ‘health publicness’ to human security oriented ‘health publicness’. The shortcomings of previous literatures on health publicness are as follows: (1) the studies have confined the range of discussions to healthcare system, (2) lacked arguments from political perspectives, and (3) failed to provide actionable pathways to achieve the goal. Thereby, we suggest ‘health publicness’ based on the concept of human security to solve multidimensional healthcare problems. The health publicness based on human security, which aims to secure everybody's freedom from want and fear, enables not only to expand the scope of health problems that can be discussed but also to propose the procedures to achieve health publicness. More specifically, it consists of substantive and procedural health publicness. The former is about ‘health security’-protecting, maintaining, and promoting individual's health-whereas, the latter is about ‘social dialogue’ guaranteeing participation of citizens, government, employers, and worker representatives. In conclusion, this study proposes the ‘Regional Healthcare Quadripartite’ as the incarnation of health publicness involving a variety of actors within and across the healthcare system.
Delivery of Health Care ; Freedom ; Humans

BACKGROUND: The aim of this study is to analyze determinants of welfare attitudes toward healthcare services in South Korea, using three main theories: self-interest (positive welfare attitudes if the policy fulfills people's personal interests), symbolic attitudes (positive welfare attitudes if the person is politically progressive or egalitarian), and sociotropic perception (positive welfare attitudes if the person experienced positive aggregated collective experiences of societal events and trends regarding the policy). Although the definition of the welfare attitude is rather ambiguous in literatures, in this investigation, we operationalize the concept as the ‘willingness to pay higher taxes to improve the level of health care services for all people in Korea' which shows individuals’ actional propensity. METHODS: We used the health module from the International Social Survey Program 2011 for the analysis (N=1,391). Five logistic regression models were built successively using two variables for each theory to measure key concepts of self-interest, symbolic attitudes, and sociotropic perceptions as independent variables. RESULTS: The result showed self-interest and symbolic attitudes factors to be strong determinants of welfare attitudes towards healthcare services in South Korea, whereas sociotropic perception factors have inconsistent effects. CONCLUSION: For a more politically elaborated healthcare reform in South Korea and elsewhere, there needs to be further research on various dimensions and determinants of welfare attitudes to understand popular basis of welfare expansion, especially in the era of inequality.
Delivery of Health Care ; Health Care Reform ; Health Status ; Humans ; Korea ; Logistic Models ; Socioeconomic Factors ; Taxes