A lawmaker criticized the incumbent government's stance that a policy to strengthen health insurance coverage under the previous Moon Jae-in administration led to a fiscal crisis, saying it is "deceiving the public."

Rep. Kang Eun-mi of the splinter Justice Party, a member of the National Assembly's Health and Welfare Committee and the Special Committee on Pension Reform criticized the Yoon Suk Yeol government's health policy direction during the parliament’s audit of the Ministry of Health and Welfare on Thursday, calling for expanding coverage.

President Yoon officially scrapped “Mooncare” at a cabinet meeting in December last year, saying that the previous government's policy of strengthening coverage "ruined the health insurance finances with a popular populist policy. Yoon said his government would focus on the sustainability of healthcare finances and introduce financial efficiency measures.

He cited the restriction of reimbursing CT and MRI tests, forcing patients to pay more money out of their pocket.

However, the lawmaker said that the government's allegation that fiscal tightening is necessary is "completely fake news and deceiving the public," noting that the so-called excessive guarantees fall short of the OECD average.

Jeon Jin-han, a former doctor and the director of policy at the Korea Federation of Healthcare Organizations, who testified, backed up the lawmaker’s claim, saying, "The government's claim that the policy of strengthening guarantees is excessive is completely different from the facts."

"We are at the bottom of the OECD in terms of coverage. As the coverage is low, the public burden is high. We have the second-highest share of household spending on healthcare among OECD countries. The proportion of households with catastrophic health expenditure, which is more than 40 percent of household expenditure, is 7.5 percent. The OECD average is 5.4 percent. Even the comparable share in the U.S. is 7.4 percent, a little smaller than us," he said. “All this is due to too small government spending on health care."

The waste is due to "overtreatment by private healthcare providers," he said. The government's push for telemedicine could also be a waste of money. He said that Canada and the U.K. have already seen overtreatment problems with telemedicine platforms, and governments spend health care money on the wrong things.

Rep. Kang said, "The Yoon administration should present a vision to increase health insurance coverage to OECD levels. It should expand public healthcare institutions and transform the healthcare supply system into a public-centered one."

She added that the government should expand reimbursement, reform the coverage system, and control non-payment to prevent overtreatment and waste.