About 3 million people aged 75 or older had their health insurance premiums automatically deducted from their pension benefits for the first time Wednesday under the controversial medical system for seniors that has increasingly become a hot political topic.
Since the April launch of the system — dubbed the medical program for seniors in the later stages of life — Wednesday marked the fourth set of automatic deductions and brought the total of seniors who have been subjected to them to 6.69 million.
The medical insurance program has outraged many seniors both because of the automatic deduction of premiums from their pension benefits and also because of what they claim is the system's discriminatory nature, which isolates them simply because they are older and visit doctors more often.