DSWD: Only few elderly folk to get P500 pension

P6 billion is needed annually to provide a monthly subsistence pension to all Filipino senior citizens. But only a small fraction of that amount is available for 2011, the social welfare agency admitted on Saturday. Amid grumblings from some senior citizens' groups, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) sought understanding for its "selective" P500 monthly pension because only P300 million is allotted for this fund next year. DSWD Secretary Corazon Soliman said the proposed 2011 budget for her department allows it to give the P500 pension only to those 80 years old and up, at least for next year. Senior Citizens Act Soliman said that while the expanded Senior Citizens Act calls for added benefits for senior citizens, the DSWD cannot implement the P500 pension for all seniors. The law, which guarantees the rights of the elderly, defines a senior citizen as a person 60 years old or older. "Hindi kakayanin ng budget. Ang unang paglaanan ng pera, ang conditional cash transfer. Kung gaganda ang ating ekonomiya sa 2010… pwede maipatupad ang batas para sa lahat," Soliman said in an interview on dzBB radio. (The proposed budget can’t fill the need for all senior citizens. The priority allocation is for the conditional cash transfer program. If our economy improves in 2010, we can find ways to give the P500 pension to all senior citizens.) Citing figures reaching her, she said the DSWD will need at least P6 billion just to give the P500 pension to all senior citizens. For now, she said the government can only afford to spend P300 million, or 5 percent of the needed P6 billion, for senior citizens' pension. Republic Act 9994, the Expanded Senior Citizens Act signed by former President Gloria Arroyo, also exempts senior citizens from the value added tax (VAT). It grants a 20-percent discount for senior citizens on purchases of food and medicine, as well as other services in restaurants and movie houses. ‘Poor people don’t live to be 80’ On the other hand, a senior citizens' organization said such a deferment of the full implementation is biased against the poor. “I’m quite disappointed," said Ed Gerlock of the NGO Coalition of Services of the Elderly (COSE), in an article on the Union of Catholic Asian News website. He said most of the elderly are below 80 years old. The UCAN article said 145,150 senior citizens are 80 years old and above — a mere three percent of some 4.1 million elderly people who are 60 years old and up. “Poor people don’t live to be 80 years old. There are going to be very few desperately poor 80-year-olds," Gerlock said. ‘Symbolic concern’ Budget Secretary Florencio Abad earlier said that due to financial difficulties, the government decided to allocate P871 million in the 2011 budget for the elderly. “Despite our budget difficulty, we still allocated an amount as our symbolic concern for the elderly," Abad said. He said the government had hoped to include a million of the elderly — the estimated number of indigent seniors — in the P500 monthly pension program but could only manage to cover a little over 10 percent of them. Abad said the budget allocation could be supplemented within the next year to bring the total coverage to 1 million elderly and benefit those 60 years and above.—JV, GMANews.TV