3. (De-)Familialization in Social Policy in East Asia

This chapter explores empirical details of the National Health Insurances in S. Korea and Taiwan, focused on their ‘de-familialization’ effects, which allows individuals to maximize their command of welfare resources, independent of familial or conjugal reciprocities. To this aim, this chapter collects and analyzes the annual statistics and compares the dependents ratio of the two programs, based on which it argues that Korea’s welfare regime is more familialized than Taiwan’s. This chapter explains the different familialistic welfare regimes of S. Korea and Taiwan, not from their family realities or labor market but from their welfare states' intervention through social policies with different familialization effects.