The accomplishments of the Social Security System are being published regularly by its officials in its web site to impress naive readers into thinking that they are constantly pursuing significant programs and projects.
In fact, most of these recent undertakings are trivial. They only distract them from pursuing the reason for being of SSS to provide adequate pensions.
For instance, only last July 18, they disclosed that they would soon be allowed to access PhilHealth’s database.
According to the press release, this would facilitate the processing of its members’ work-related claims for hemodialysis under the Employees’ Compensation Program.
After the 90-session PhilHealth coverage per year has been exhausted, SSS would resume paying using ECP’s benefits the P2,600-per-session cost of hemodialysis.
This is strange. In the first place, PhilHealth is supposed to have determined that 90 dialysis sessions were enough to meet a patient’s needs. They are almost equivalent to having a dialysis twice a week for one whole year.
Moreover, the EC charter mandates that all actual, necessary and reasonable medical care and rehabilitation expenses of work-related illnesses and injuries are covered. PhilHealth should not shell out another peso of benefit for these contingencies because it would only twice compensate the provider for the same services.
Why must PhilHealth benefits be paid, and at that, ahead of EC benefits?
Indeed, if PhilHealth could share its database—without violating privacy laws—it might as well share its other data with SSS to support its more significant objectives.
It could share its data on maternity deliveries, disabilities, and selected illnesses to facilitate the payment by SSS of their counterpart cash benefits.
PhilHealth could also share the contribution and wage statistics of its employed, voluntary, self-employed, and overseas Filipino worker members. With actual data, SSS could better plan how to increase its contribution base ceiling—now pegged at P16,000—considering that PhilHealth’s members contribute based on a higher maximum salary of P35,000.
SSS officials have also announced of having “released P7.93 billion in salary loans to 385,000 members during the first quarter.” They had to launch again, however, another loan condonation program in order to “collect P5.1 billion in overdue loan principal and interest from about half a million delinquent borrowers.”
The salary loan program offers short-term relief to SSS members, but it clearly distracts its officials and employees from pursuing other major functions. Not only are scarce personnel being diverted to administer it, the loans remain unpaid, or they give little returns that are not even enough to pay for the program’s administrative expenses.
SSS officials have forgotten— or perhaps they were not born yet—when for the same reasons its housing loan program was discontinued by President Cory Aquino 30 years ago.
Only last June 2, SSS bannered that it “disbursed a total of P13.15 million in annual incentive benefits to more than 40,000 qualified overseas Filipino workers enrolled in the SSS Flexi-fund Program, which is a provident fund created to encourage OFW-members to save up in order to supplement their retirement benefits under the regular SSS program.”
Impressive, but when scrutinized, these numbers reveal an insignificant AIB per OFW member of only P327. With total members’ equity of P532 million, our typical OFW has an equity of P13,228—the amount that awaits him if he returns today.
For a fund that was established 15 years ago in 2001, the SSS Flexi-fund Program despite being offered in 21 offices abroad had only attracted an insignificant 0.4 percent of our 10 million OFWs.
SSS officials continued to open additional and bigger branches in saturated urban areas such as Manila, Pasig, Valenzuela, Biñan and Makati while its offices in the provinces have remained few and far between.
They have also announced that they collected P1.12 billion of contributions in Makati City and formally signed with Novaliches Development Cooperative “a joint commitment in establishing new channels for SSS payments and expanding the social protection of workers.”
Elsewhere, SSS lawyers have succeeded in getting court convictions against the president of an advertising agency for failure to remit nearly P3 million in contributions, and the owner of a book-binding business in Lucena City for not keeping “true and accurate work records of new and separated employees.”
Indeed, SSS officials must have achieved successes in these trivial undertakings. Yet, they still couldn’t declare that these achievements would enable the agency to enhance its pensions someday.
These successes only give them an illusionary sense of accomplishment. In reality, they worsen the financial viability of SSS because they distract them from pursuing more significant projects.
For instance, why couldn’t they outline realistic options in the grant of that long-overdue P2,000 pension increase, which is again being revived in Congress?
Have they finished the project to restore lost contribution credits and adjust retroactively pensions? They committed its completion by December 31 last year. Have they moved it to September 1?
Where is its 2015 Annual Report? Is the summary of operations as of November 2015 the best that they could present in the SSS Facts and Figures brochure?