1,064 health professionals demand President Yoon’s resignation

Doctors, dentists, oriental medicine practitioners, and nurses have issued a declaration calling for President Yoon Suk Yeol to resign.

These healthcare professionals claimed that President Yoon's irresponsible policy of increasing the number of medical students has sparked a healthcare crisis and called for Yoon to take responsibility and step down.

On Thursday, the Korean Federation of Medical Activist Groups for Health Rights announced the declaration during a rally at Gwanghwamun Square in downtown Seoul, calling for President Yoon's resignation. The declaration was signed by 227 physicians, 129 nurses, 243 dentists, 37 oriental medicine practitioners, 266 pharmacists, 59 healthcare workers, 57 healthcare researchers and activists, and 36 students.

“We are here because we can no longer stand by as the Yoon administration pushes for healthcare privatization, neglects public healthcare, and endangers people's lives,” they said.

The Yoon government is trying to shift the “right to healthcare” that should be guaranteed by the state to individual responsibility and replace the principle of health insurance based on the principle of social solidarity with the principle of self-funded private insurance. It wants to create a country with extreme healthcare inequality like the United States. This is what healthcare reform is about, the statement said.

They also attributed the nine-month-long healthcare crisis to the government.

“The government is busy just trying to downplay the crisis. It can neither resolve the crisis nor is interested in patients’ sufferings,” the statement said. “The doctors' group that unconditionally opposed the increase in the medical school enrollment quota and left their patients is responsible, but the irresponsibility of the Yoon government, which proposed the increase of 2,000 medical students only for the general election, is at the center of this crisis.”

They also argued that the government's healthcare reform is nothing more than a plan to privatize healthcare as it lacks a plan to expand public healthcare.

“The regional healthcare gap is caused by the lack of public medical institutions and the gap in the collapsed national public healthcare system,” they said. “However, this regime has done nothing. It has rejected the public and community doctor system and cut the budget to restore hospitals devastated after Covid-19.”

The statement said that instead of expanding public hospitals, this regime's policy is to make public hospitals fail, pointing out that healthcare reform is only in words. It added that what this regime has been doing instead is neglecting public healthcare, prioritizing corporate interests, and promoting privatization.

“In this time of crisis, we can no longer tolerate the Yoon administration, which is ruining people's lives by prioritizing privatization over public welfare and solidarity,” the statement said. “The Yoon administration must step down. If it doesn't step down, the people will step up to remove the regime as history has taught them. In the name of healthcare workers, we will fight together to materialize our intent.”