The government's primary care innovation pilot program was designed to enable local clinics to continuously manage registered middle-aged and older patients, and it began by limiting eligibility to clinic-level medical institutions and selecting 100 sites in total. More than a simple support program, it is intended to test a family doctor-style care system centered on prevention and counseling, making the question of who should take responsibility for local primary care a core institutional issue. The strong backlash from the Korean medicine community stems less from the compensation amount itself than from concerns over where regional patients and National Health Insurance funds will flow in the future. Citing the fact that Korean medicine clinics had meaningful participation in an earlier primary care home-visit pilot program, they are calling for broader eligibility, and this dispute can be seen as another case in which a long-running inter-professional conflict has resurfaced through fee schedules and program design.

On the 23rd, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety found 26 cases during an online inspection in which advertisements made ordinary foods or cosmetics appear to be products close to pharmaceuticals. In particular, as interest in health functional foods claiming body fat reduction has grown, consumers have become more likely to expect benefits that go beyond the actual approved scope. The problem is that these advertisements rely more on staging than on the products themselves. Devices such as fictitious doctors or pharmacists created with generative AI manufacture a sense of trust, and with more cases of consumers buying through SNS ads only to struggle to verify sellers or obtain refunds, the limits of existing labeling regulations in adequately protecting consumers have become clear.