Social Security celebrates 40 years as a contributory and solidary system
Social Security as a contributory and solidary system turns 40 years old, at a time when a reform is needed that makes it "more sustainable in the social and financial".
In an article published in the magazine of Social Security, the Minister of Labor, Magdalena Valerio, believes that "the fact that marks the quality of life of one country against others depends, to a large extent, the degree of protection offered by the State your citizenship. "
"Social security is a right and the entities that manage it have become essential in our day to day," says the minister on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the creation of the National Institute of Social Security.
Together with the birth of Social Security, four decades ago, the General Treasury of Social Security was given legal status and health management, social services and unemployment were separated into three new institutions (Insalud, Inserso and INEM).
"The greatest success as a country lies", says the minister, in having built a health system that cares for people regardless of their level of income or what they contribute, as well as having built a social system that provides economic aid to who want to work and can not do it, or who guarantee a pension to live after the end of the work cycle.
In these 40 years there has been an evident advance in the Social Security system, although it has not been exempt at certain times of setbacks, of uncertainties, of measures that have sought to reach the "foundations" of the system, adds the minister.
In this sense, the Secretary of State for Social Security, Octavio Granado, details some of the obstacles that appeared along the path of Social Security, from its initial prototype to the system that exists today.
Thus, it speaks of a system of protection that had had since 1939 a "quite chaotic" route with an Obligatory Old Age Insurance (SOVI) whose quotas "were seized by the victors of the Civil War".
However, it highlights how at the beginning of 1963, Minister Romero Gorría, "a well-meaning official who wanted to regularize that brittle chaos", tried to order things by establishing a Social Security for salaried workers, although in practice he did not succeed.
"The serious crisis of some mutual societies obliges them to dump most of them into the pay-as-you-go system, generating special regimes (coal mining) or special framing conditions (Renfe machinists, bullfighters and artists)," explains Granado.
