Interac Health Insurance MIS-information and The Birth of the Corrector:
Act One - The CYA Request
It all started with this simple CYA request from Interac to some of its teachers:
Subject: Proof of Insurance
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 15:21:55 +0900Dear Teachers,
It has come to come to our attention that we have no indication that you are covered by any health insurance. As was stated during training, you are required by Japanese law to be covered by health insurance. Therefore we are not able to employ anyone who is not covered.
So we need your cooperation in this matter. Please sign the disclaimer and send us proof of your insurance, or fill out the application for Interglobal and send it to us. Headquarters in Tokyo has given us a deadline of May 18 to get this information to them.
Sincerely,
Shakai Hokenless
Interac Osaka
Part of the reason that this I found this email to be offensive is because of the fact that they MISquote Japanese law. The law doesn’t require you to be covered by insurance; the law requires you to be covered by one of the two Japanese Government systems of insurance. I found it strange that they omitted this “minor” detail.
Another part of the reason I found the email to be offensive is because of the actual text of the disclaimer:
1) implies that the InterGlobal Insurance is the primary option available by not mentioning other options
2) implies that if you decide not to enroll in InterGlobal sign this document, you don’t need to do anything else and
3) it FALSELY implies that Interac has no responsibility in the matter of insurance whatsoever. In fact, if a teacher is working FULL TIME as many are (does 8:30am to 4:30pm sound familiar to anyone?) then Interac most definitely DOES bear responsibility to sign their teachers up to Shakai Hoken. While, there may be some Interac teachers SOMEWHERE in Japan that have Shakai Hoken, most, including many people who are qualified for it, do not.
The real reason that Interac forces their teachers to sign a document with the phrase
I am wholly responsible for the financing of my own personal health care requirements
included in its text is because they know that companies must pay 50% of Shakai Hoken payments for qualified teachers. Companies constantly hide information about the Japanese government insurance programs SO THAT they can avoid paying into the Shakai Hoken plan.
After reading this email from Mr./Mrs./Ms. Hokenless (remember, we are concealing gender identities/preferences as well as names here), I decided that I wanted to inform teachers of their options because many people that put their trust in their employers end up NOT knowing what they should.
I contacted Dennis Tesolat of the General Union, and he typed up some REAL information for the teachers.