User:Anna204/Racism in Japan

Healthcare
Japan provides universal health insurance for all citizens. Foreigners staying in Japan for a year or more are required to enroll for one of the public health insurance schemes. However, before this policy was mandated, many foreign workers, particularly Japanese Brazilians, were less likely to be covered by health insurance due to refusal of the employer.

Initially, many prefectures refused to allow foreigners from entering the National Health Insurance (Kokumin Kenkou Hoken) as foreigners were not considered to be eligible. The policy was revised to include foreigners after local governments witnessed healthcare disparities between Japanese citizens and foreigners. A study conducted revealed that incidences of increased poor health was high among the foreign workers living in the Tochigi Prefecture. A quarter of these workers did not visit clinics or hospitals, due to language barriers and high medical costs. Nearly 60% of the 317 workers surveyed experienced difficulty in communicating in English.

Some hospitals have been known to turn patients away if they could not confirm their residence status. The NTT Medical Center Tokyo, located in the Gotanda district of Tokyo, announced on their website that foreigners must present their insurance card and residence cards. If they were unable to then they would be denied service, with the exception of emergency cases. A maternity ward, located in Tokyo, had stated on their website that services would be limited for patients who could only speak at a conversational level in Japanese.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many ethnic-minority healthcare providers have been found to not be assigned to treating patients with the COVID-19 infection, a strong contrast to Western countries. Possible reasons for this include the low number of ethnic-minority healthcare providers working in Japan's clinics and hospitals, as well as language barriers.