Q24N (EFE) Panamanian president, José Raúl Mulino, announced last week actions that he will promote to face the “storm” of problems that the state-owned Social Security Fund (CSS) is going through, all to recover the entity, but, he assured, not with the desire to privatize it.
“We are in the middle of a strong storm without reliable instruments. The worst thing is that everything indicates that the data that we will find (in the institution) are worse than those stated by the current authorities,” said Mulino in his first message to the nation, who assumed his five-year mandate on July 1.
The change in the direction of the CSS will occur on October 1.
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The lack of medicines, the surgical delay, the “inhuman” treatment of users, the deficient appointment system, the absence of medical supplies to perform operations and the deficit in the pension system are some of the problems that Mulino plans to attack, but not by privatizing social security.
“I repeat: the Social Security Fund will not be privatized. This issue is out of the question, a reality that allows us to move forward on specific issues, because the problems that afflict the system are specific,” he said.
In his message, the president did not refer to parametric measures of increasing fees and the retirement age, which are socially rejected.
Proposals
Mulino identified health benefits as the issue that has “the greatest complaints due to the inability of this organization to provide solutions to Panamanians in critical moments,” who also receive an “inhuman” service and do not have access to medicines that do not arrive on time due to problems in the bidding process, storage, distribution and delivery.
He cited data from the outgoing administration, which, he said, his government team “must verify,” that there is a 20% shortage of medicines.
He also pointed out that in the state there is a shortage of medical materials and only 44% of surgical supplies, for which he affirmed that one does not have to be an “expert” to know that if the CSS has “19,350 surgeries delayed it is because the system collapsed.”
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“This means that more than half of the patients waiting for an operation will have after-effects or will die before reaching an operating room. This imprudence borders on criminal,” he said.
In this sense, he proposed as a first measure the unification of the purchasing system through the “Single Purchase” program, which unifies the Ministry of Health (Minsa) and the Social Security Fund.
He also proposed introducing improvements in the medical appointment system, with an “effective control” so that “they are not ghosts as they happen today” and each patient has faster attention, minimizing cancellations and empty spaces.
Regarding the Disability, Old Age and Death (IVM) program that supports pensions, Mulino stressed that this is “a complex system, with deep structural problems and for which real solutions must be proposed and where the numbers make sense.”
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The deficit, which reaches 673 million dollars in one of the two pension subsystems (in the defined benefit one; the other is a mixed one of individual savings), which would run out of funds soon according to a report by the International Labor Organization (ILO), is one of the problems that the CSS is dragging along, since none of the last three governments have been able to undertake the reforms necessary to overcome the crisis.
In 2005, the Government of Martín Torrijos (2004-2009) carried out a structural reform to the CSS, creating another retirement or pension model that combines the Exclusively Defined Benefit System (SEBD) with a new mixed system of individual savings.
With this change, which came into effect in 2008, contributors under 35 years of age would voluntarily move to the mixed system and those over 35 would remain in the SEBD. For many analysts, this was the root of the problem, since the defined distribution system was left without contributors.
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