Cortizo’s legacy  “bankrupt social security” — analyst

Following Tuesday’s lackluster management report by Panama President Laurentino Cortizo the lawyer and political analyst, Rodrigo Noriega, referred to the president’s statements about a ‘ transition of orderly and peaceful government’ and said that ” it was the most positive thing about that speech” because the president spoke as an official, not as a politician.

Noriega was struck by the fact that the critical issue of lack of funds in the Social Security Fund (CSS) was totally ‘ invisible ‘ because not a single word was said about it.

Despite the countless complaints from patients, retirees, pensioners, doctors, nurses, and others interested in the typical problems of Social Security, about the lack of medicines, supplies, and lack of funds, the central government only focused on holding ‘ tables of discussion’. dialogue’ that “came to nothing,” said the lawyer.

“The legacy of Laurentino Cortizo will be remembered (…) as the president who left Social Security bankrupt and passed it on to the next government,” Noriega emphasized.

Noriega considered that the Cortizo administration should have laid the foundations and started with pedagogy so that the entire population was aware that the CSS was at risk and is a ” systemic problem of the Panamanian economy”, for which at some point, You will have to pay more, however, this approach remains an “enigma.”

From the analyst’s point of view, the problem could have been treated in a ‘ less dramatic’ way if the administrations of Ricardo Martinelli, Juan Carlos Varela, and now, Laurentino Cortizo, had done their “homework” but they did not, then, the next government had to take ‘drastic and unpopular in some ways’ measures to address the issue.

The lawyer hopes that whatever measures the next government takes, whether more quotas, more years, or more taxes, it will be a ‘consensus’ measure with the key actors that will help to have ‘ social peace’.

As he explained, the lack of funds in the Social Security Fund until 2030 is estimated at $11 billion, and the Cortizo administration did not make any significant contribution to the problem, but what it did was ” tie it to mining”.

This year, the defined benefit program of the Disability, Old Age and Death fund enters an actuarial deficit, that is, there are no funds to pay the obligations that already exist (…), that is going to happen, possibly, in the second half of the year,” he explained

According to the lawyer, the CSS needs a ” reengineering ” because you cannot have two public system models, but rather a universal one and it must be managed by another institution other than the CSS. What has been proposed, according to Noriega, are ‘dramatic’ options that could have been avoided if the past administrations had fulfilled their task.