During the debate about the shocking pension reform, Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov brought up the question of a change in the model of granting allowanced to disabled people. Mr. Dyankov spoke in favour of tightening of controls in the system, proposing the idea medical labour committees to become functional under the auspices of the National Insurance Institute. Subsequently, the government presented data showing that currently it gives over 800,000 disability pensions (which requires a spending of BGN1.7 billion per year) and indirectly accused the medical committees of corruption and syphoning the budget of the National Insurance Institute in large amounts. According to the rulers, the problem can be solved only if the committees of medical experts get detached from the supervision of the Healthcare Ministry and their functions are performed by the Insurance Institute for the latter can tightly monitor how money is allocated.
Such a measure however will most probably not produce any significant financial effect on the pension system and in purely legal terms it could create a conflict of interests and is contrary to the texts of the Healthcare Act. Anyone can imagine a new attitude towards new applicants for disability pensions
from an institution with almost two-billion wide budget gap, which is told it pays too much in disabled people’s allowances and need to cut those costs.
If the National Insurance Institute is my employer, of course, it will try to influence my decisions, comments on the case Dr. Petko Nikov, chairman of the board of the Association of Medical Expertise Physicians.
Rather arguable is the proposition that the Government can now point a finger at the system of medical committees. Those receiving disability pensions are not almost 1 million people, as Minister Dyankov claims. Even their percentage ratio compared to other pensioners is lower than the average rate for the EU. According to statistics of the Pensions Department in the National Insurance Institute on 30 June 2010 the number of persons of working age receiving disability pension, was just 262,228 people. Of them only about 5,000 suffered from an occupational accident or occupational disease. The remaining hundreds of thousands are in fact people who have already retired but qualified to receive disability bonus allowances to their pensions.
Today the scenario is rather reversed: many of the people eligible for disability pension do not take one. Data of the National Centre for Public Health and the analysis shows that Bulgarians suffering from cancer were around 270,000 in 2009, the number of diabetics was about 320,000, while people suffering from various forms of asthma are 200,000. Heart attack survivors come to around 12,000 people. Another 4,500 citizens suffer from multiple sclerosis, 16,000 suffer from Parkinson’s disease, while those with chronic renal failure exceed 15,000. Putting these numbers together gives a result much greater than 800,000 … This calculation was prepared by the Executive Director of the Agency for Persons with Disabilities Mincho Koralski, according to whom, if they used averaged data for people with disabilities in Europe (about 16% of total), it appears that a population of 7.5 million people in Bulgaria boasts with 1.2 million disabled.
