ASTANA – President Nursultan Nazarbayev has signed a law on social health insurance as well as bills supporting Kazakhstan’s Plan of the Nation, the series of 100 steps intended to implement its major five institutional reforms programme, over the past week.
The legislation includes amendments or new laws on social insurance, public services, industrial policy, corruption, elections, labour, public information and public councils.
On Nov. 18, President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed the law “On compulsory social health insurance,” which corresponds to steps in the plan on implementing mandatory social health insurance and strengthening the financial sustainability of the healthcare system through the principle of mutual responsibility of the state, employers and citizens.
The new law sets out sources of financing for mandatory social health insurance, and sets the state contribution to the compulsory insurance at 4 percent of the assessed cost as of July 1, 2017; rising to 5 percent in 2018, 6 percent 2023 and 7 percent in 2024. Employer contributions to the fund were set at 2 percent to begin in 2017, 3 percent in 2018, 4 percent in 2019 and 5 percent in 2020. Employee contributions are set at 1 percent in 2019 and 2 percent in 2020, with some categories of employee or entrepreneur set at 2 percent in 2017 and rising gradually to 7 percent by 2020.
Exempt from paying contributions are children, mothers of many children who have received state recognition, veterans of World War II, the disabled, the unemployed, persons in residential institutions, persons enrolled in full-time education, persons on maternal leave or primarily responsible for raising a child until the child reaches the age of three, pregnant women, retired persons, law enforcement officials, prisoners or other detained persons, servicemen and members of special state bodies.
Over the following two days, amendments to the country’s laws on issues of industrial and innovative policy (the law supporting the State Programme of Accelerated Industrial and Innovative Development or SPAIID), anti-corruption efforts, income and property and the provision of public services and elections were also signed.
Updates to the law on elections cover when and how candidates and their spouses must declare income, assets and residency. Amendments to the anti-corruption law cover instructions on avoiding conflicts of interest among civil servants, including in the world of spouses or family members, as well as accepting gifts and the mechanisms for dealing with corruption when discovered.
