| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北大學 === 社會工作學系 === 96 === In a democratic society, the media has played an important role in shaping public opinions regarding government policies. Nevertheless, the relationship between welfare policy and the media has rarely been studied in Taiwan. This thesis intends to explore the roles of the media in the promotion of the Phase II National Health Insurance Program with special reference to it financing scheme. This thesis has referred to the research conducted by Collins et al. (2006) about the 2002 Canadian health care reform debate, which exploring four media effects by examining Canadian newspapers.
The method employed in this research is content analysis. The research has identified 198 clippings about the report of the financing schemes of the Phase II NHI, gathered from four newspapers: the China Times, the United Daily News, the Min Sheng Daily News, and the Liberty Times. These materials have been coded into quantitative data and analyzed with the statistical software. The categories of the quantitative data include the type of the news, the source of information, the subject of the report, the tone and position of the news, and so on. Besides, qualitative analysis of these reports has been conducted in order to supplement the interpretations of the quantitative analysis.
The research findings are as follows. Six periods of intensive reports from January 2005 to June 2006 can be identified, following such key events as the NHI Consensus Conference, the 10th anniversary of the NHI implementation, the falling of the famous model (Lin, Chi-Ling) from horseback, the NHI revised draft proposed by the DoH, the resignation press conference of the Premier Hsieh, and the NHI revised draft reviewed by the Legislative Yuan. In the first three periods, the government was the main source of the information and could dominate the report to some extend. Also, the media reports about the Phase II NHI tended to be in a positive tone. The injury of the famous model Lin and the following treatments uncovered the issue of the unfair sharing of the NHI contribution fees and therefore the Phase II NHI had attracted the public attentions. More information was needed by the public, but the officials seemed to be more uncertain about the details of the Phase II NHI. At the same time, non-official sources of information coming from scholars, experts, medical professionals, and NGOs were shown on the media. The tone of reporting the financing scheme had gradually changed from positive to negative and may influence the passage of the NHI revised draft based on the Phase II NHI Planning in the Legislative Yuan.
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