An analysis of 2025 auto insurance medical expense statistics from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service by the Korean Medical Association (KMA) shows that traditional Korean medicine now accounts for over 60 percent of total auto insurance medical costs.
According to the KMA, the total cost for auto insurance medical care in 2025 was 2.8114 trillion won, an increase of approximately 3 percent compared to the previous year.
During this period, while medical expenses for Western medicine remained nearly stagnant, expenses for traditional Korean medicine rose by about 5 percent to 1.6972 trillion won, accounting for 60.5 percent of the total.
Consequently, the gap in medical expenses between Western medicine and traditional Korean medicine widened from approximately 510 billion won the previous year to 590 billion won.
In particular, traditional Korean medicine showed a trend where medical expenses were excessively concentrated in a small number of hospitalization cases.
Hospitalization costs for traditional Korean medicine amounted to 597.4 billion won, accounting for 35.2 percent of the total traditional medicine expenses, yet the actual number of hospitalization claims was only 574,000, which is 4.4 percent of the total.
Furthermore, the growth rate of hospitalized patients in traditional Korean medicine hospitals reached 7.08 percent, the highest among all medical facility types.
The KMA pointed out that the continuous increase in medical expenses for traditional Korean medicine could undermine the financial stability of auto insurance and increase the burden of insurance premiums on the public.
(Photo courtesy of the Korean Medical Association, Yonhap News)
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