Asia's bitter pill to swallow in hospital services

Overprescription and overtreatment remain big issues for healthcare

Plagued by cost overruns and a $4.2 billion deficit, Taiwan's National Health Insurance set out in 2012 to find out what lay behind the problem.

The results were a mixture of the expected and unexpected. Other cities, it turned out, were not paying their fair share, so the entire cost fell on Taipei. At the same time, patients were visiting hospitals more than anywhere else in the world and being prescribed many more drugs than they needed or could ever take.