Hanam Health Center's Page Lists Two Different Co-Pay Caps

Two Different Caps on One Hanam Health Center Page

The psychological counseling voucher page on the website of the Hanam City Public Health Center, in Gyeonggi Province, opens with a single line: “New applications for 2026 closed on 8.13.” The program is supposed to run through the end of the year, but in this particular district, new sign-ups stopped in mid-August.

Scroll down the same page and you hit the pricing explanation. The body text says that, depending on where a household falls on the Median Income Standard¹, the applicant pays between 0% and 30% of the service price out of pocket. But the very last row of the table right below it lists a 50% co-payment rate for households above 180% of median income. That’s two different caps on a single page.

Anyone trying to figure out this program needs answers to three questions: Am I eligible? How much would I pay? And can I still apply now? For this piece, I lined up the official guidance on the mental health counseling voucher — from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, down to local health centers, down to private explainer posts — in that order. The answer to the first question turned out to be reasonably clear. It was the second and third questions where I started running into blanks and contradictions.

Three Names, One Framework

The current Mental Health Counseling Voucher Program has had two names before this one.

From 2022 to 2024, there was the Youth Mental Health Support Program. The Hanam City Public Health Center’s own guidance also lists this as a ‘22-to-‘24 program, and excludes anyone already receiving that support from duplicate funding.

In July 2024, the National Mind Investment Support Program launched. In its announcement that June, the government said it would provide 8 counseling sessions (worth up to ₩640,000 (~$460)) to citizens dealing with depression, anxiety, and other emotional difficulties, with the co-payment scaled from 0 to 30% depending on income level. The plan at the time was to expand toward at-risk groups for mental health in 2024-2025, then broaden coverage to the general public starting in 2026. The shift from a youth-only program to a nationwide one happened then — not this year.

In 2026, the name changed again, to the Mental Health Counseling Voucher Program. The Ministry of Health and Welfare’s guidance states there are no age or income requirements. Instead, applicants need one of the following documents: a referral from an institution such as a Mental Health Welfare Center, a university counseling center, or a Wee Center (Korea’s school-based counseling network); a diagnosis or opinion letter from a psychiatrist; a score of 10 or higher on the depression screening test (PHQ-9)² from the national health checkup; proof of status as a self-reliance-preparing youth (a young person aging out of state care) or an extended-care child (a child whose state-care period has been extended); or a linkage referral from the Neighborhood Clinic Mental Health Care Linkage Pilot Program. Counseling runs for 8 sessions total, and the per-session rate depends on the counselor’s certification: ₩80,000 for Grade 1 and ₩70,000 for Grade 2.

8 sessions, ₩80,000 per session, up to ₩640,000 total — these are the same figures as the 2024 announcement. The practice of gatekeeping with proof requirements hasn’t changed either. I covered the problems with that documentation gate in my piece last July on “resting” youth (a term for young people counted as economically inactive without being job seekers or students), so I’ll skip over it here.

What’s notably different this year is the burden on higher-income earners. The co-payment rate, which was 0-30% in the 2024 announcement, now appears as four tiers — 0%, 10%, 30%, and 50% — in guidance from several local public health centers this year.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Table Only Goes Up to ‘Type A’

The Ministry of Health and Welfare’s own policy page has a copayment-rate table too. The left column is headed “Standard Median Income,” but the row beneath it doesn’t list income brackets at all — it just says Type A, Type B, Type C, and Type D. The right column lists 0%, 10%, 30%, and 50%. For each type, the page even breaks down — down to the won — exactly how much the government pays and how much the patient pays for 8 sessions. The one thing it never tells you is which type your own income actually falls into.

That blank gets filled in by local public health center pages instead. The health centers in Gwangjin District, Seoul, and Wonju, Gangwon Province, spell out the brackets this way: 0% at 70% of median income or below, 10% for over 70%–120%, 30% for over 120%–180%, and 50% above 180%. Matching these brackets to the figures in the Ministry’s table, the total out-of-pocket cost for 8 sessions works out like this:

Standard Median Income	Copayment Rate	Grade 1 Type, 8 Sessions	Grade 2 Type, 8 Sessions
70% or below	0%	₩0	₩0
Over 70%–120%	10%	₩64,000	₩56,000
Over 120%–180%	30%	₩192,000	₩168,000
Over 180%	50%	₩320,000	₩280,000

Youths aging out of state care, children in extended protective custody, and legally registered single-parent families pay 0% regardless of income.

The trouble is that not every official page matches this table. As we saw earlier, Hanam’s page lists both 30% and 50% on the very same page. The Cheonan, South Chungcheong health center guidance that turns up in search results puts the over-180% bracket at 30%. Once you move into private guides, the numbers scatter even further. One counseling platform’s guide states a copayment of 10–30% in its main text, then says 0–50% in its FAQ section — within the same post. Another guide claims that this year Type C rose from 20% to 30% and Type D rose from 30% to 50%, but I couldn’t find any official document laying out the 2025 standards this time around.

If your income is above 180% of the median, which page you happen to read first could lead you to expect ₩192,000 for 8 Grade 1 sessions — or ₩320,000. The difference is ₩128,000.

The Answer to ‘Where’ Lives on Yet Another Site

The next question after cost is where to actually get counseling. The Ministry of Health and Welfare page dispatches this in a single line: check the service provider on the Social Service Electronic Voucher Portal.

Follow Hanam City’s guidance and you’ll find the counter changes three times between application and your first counseling session. You apply at the Administrative Welfare Center (Haengjeong Boksi Center, a local civil-service office handling welfare administration) in your registered residence (online applications through Bokjiro, the government welfare portal, can only be made by the individual, age 19 or older); the public health center selects recipients and notifies them by mail; and the user then picks a service provider — regardless of address — and applies for counseling. The counseling fee is paid the same day with the National Happiness Card, a government-issued voucher payment card, while the co-payment is paid separately into the chosen institution’s account. The voucher expires 120 days after its creation date regardless of remaining sessions, and you can only apply once a year.

The Hanam City page adds that you can check regional service providers, remaining voucher balance, and co-payment tiers by income level on the Electronic Voucher Portal. To sum up: you apply through Bokjiro or the Administrative Welfare Center, eligibility is explained by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, income brackets and deadlines come from the public health center, service providers are listed on the Electronic Voucher Portal, and payment runs through the National Happiness Card. To get the final answer on cost and location, you have to open at least three different sites.

The “until budget runs out” catch

The Seoul city guidelines list the application period as running from January 1 to December 31, with a catch attached: “until budget runs out.” Hanam City is a place where that catch actually kicked in. It closed new applications on August 13.

I couldn’t find an official list tracking which local governments closed applications when. So if you’re looking into this program for the first time in September, even with your documents in hand, you’d need to call your local public health center or community welfare center just to find out whether you can still apply. Institutional referral letters, diagnoses, or medical opinions all need to have been issued within 3 months of the application date. If you get your documents first and only then discover that applications are closed, those documents’ validity period keeps ticking down while you wait.

What Search Volume Tells Us — and What It Doesn’t

In the domestic search data our editorial team pulled, “mental health counseling voucher” logged a monthly average of 5,070 searches as of the latest observation month, August 2026, with a 1-year total of 51,460 searches, and the trend was classified as rising.

This number counts searches, not people. One person could have searched multiple times. And since the program’s name changed back in January this year, search volume could rise simply because queries using the old name shifted over to the new one. Search data alone also can’t tell us whether people were looking for cost information or for an application portal. So this number tells us nothing more than “a steadily growing number of people are searching under this name.” What those people actually saw once they landed on the page is what this piece set out to check.

Oswarld’s Lens

What trips people up in this system isn’t the design — it’s the guidance. Saying the program covers 8 sessions with no age or income limits is enough to announce the policy. But what someone about to apply actually needs is the next three lines: what income bracket am I in, is my region still accepting applications, and which institution do I go to. Right now those three lines live on three different sites, and one of them shows different numbers from page to page.

The burden of piecing this together falls on people seeking counseling for depression and anxiety — or on the family members looking things up on their behalf. It’s a structure where the effort of cross-checking information lands hardest on exactly the people least equipped to handle it.

The fix doesn’t need to be ambitious. Write “70% or below median income” next to “Type A” on the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s table. Gather each region’s current intake status onto a single page. Strip out the old cost-sharing language still lingering on local government pages after the system was restructured. There may be administrative reasons this is hard to consolidate — budget allocation and burn rates differ by region. But if you rename a program without updating the price tag that goes with it, the first thing someone finds after searching the new name is a set of numbers that don’t match.

Closing

When a program’s name changes, search engines quickly catch up to the new name. What this issue tried to fill in was the gap search can’t close on its own: how much someone pays once they find the program under its new name, and whether they can actually apply right now.

If you’re looking into this program, it’s safer to double-check your co-payment rate at your local public health center’s page or through the Health and Welfare Counseling Center (129), and to ask whether new applications are even open before you go pulling together documents.

If you’re going through a genuinely hard time right now, you can call the Suicide Prevention Counseling Line at 109.

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💬 Reader, what was the most confusing part when you looked into the mental health counseling voucher? Was it the cost, where to apply, or the application deadline? Let us know in the comments.

📨 If someone around you — family or a colleague — is looking into this program for someone else, please pass this along.

References & Further Reading

• Ministry of Health and Welfare, Mental Health Counseling Voucher Program, last updated January 9, 2026. The source for eligibility, documentation requirements, unit pricing, and the co-payment rate table by Type A through D.
• Korea Policy Briefing, “Caring for the Nation’s Mental Health… ‘Professional Counseling’ Support for 1 Million People by 2027”, June 26, 2024. The source for the July 2024 launch, the 0–30% co-payment range, the planned 2026 expansion to the general public, and the 109 counseling hotline.
• Hanam City Public Health Center, Psychological Counseling Voucher Program (formerly the National Mental Investment Support Program). The source for the August 13 new-application deadline, the 30%/50% figures listed on the same page, and the usage procedure.
• Gwangjin District Public Health Center, Mental Health Counseling Voucher Program. The source for co-payment rates by median-income bracket.
• Wonju City Public Health Center, Mental Health Counseling Voucher Program. Used to cross-check the same brackets.
• Seoul Metropolitan Government, Guide to the Psychological Counseling Voucher Program, February 20, 2026. The source for application periods and notes on budget exhaustion.
• Social Service Electronic Voucher Portal, socialservice.or.kr. The search portal for participating providers.

The author is Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn). Current roles: Adjunct Professor at Sejong University, Strategy Consultant at INLEVEL9. Career, research, books, and recent work are kept current on the About page. Latest · July 2026: HEMA-2: A Consolidation-Aware Tri-Memory Architecture with Multi-Channel Scheduling for Lifelong Conversational AI.

📝 Glossary

Footnotes

1. Standard Median Income: a figure for household income, announced annually by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Many welfare programs use a percentage of this figure to determine eligibility and co-payment rates. ↩

2. PHQ-9: a nine-item depression screening questionnaire. This voucher program accepts a score of 10 or higher on the national health checkup — indicating moderate or greater depression — as valid documentation. ↩