Government panel calls for further slashing of social welfare programs

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

   The Fiscal System Council, an advisory panel to the finance minister on June 6 submitted to the minister a set of proposals to be incorporated into the FY 2008 budget basic policies that the Abe Cabinet will adopt in June.

   While calling for further cuts in social welfare programs and all-out budgetary restraint, the panel used securing social welfare funds as a pretext to propose a “drastic reform” of the taxation system, including an increase in the consumption tax rate.

   It proposed introducing a system to exempt minor illnesses from health insurance coverage, curb the increase in nursing care insurance payments, and constantly review the pension system. Concerning livelihood protection assistance, it proposed applying more stringent criteria, abolishing the additional benefits for child-rearing families, and restraining beneficiaries from seeing doctors.

   The panel report described Japan’s present welfare services as if the public is receiving more values of benefits than that of burdens imposed on them.

   The reality, however, is the exact opposite.

   The government has been taking measures to deprive patients of medical services such as invalidating the health insurance cards of those who are unable to pay the expensive national insurance premiums and evicting terminally ill patients from hospitals, thereby rapidly increasing the number of “medically abandoned people.”

   The national pension plan provides pensioners who had paid high pension premiums with benefits far less than the livelihood protection standards.

   The government has also axed the minimum necessary nursing-care services to support the elderly, regardless of whether the recipients are at home or in facilities, that had enabled them to live with dignity. This also rapidly creates “nursing-care-abandoned elderly.”

   Government denials to provide livelihood protection assistance have forced some citizens to starve to death or kill themselves.

   Mother-children families and senior citizens are facing severe hardships because the livelihood protection benefits have been slashed.

   All these problems are occurring in the world’s second largest economy.

   Burdens on the general populace have been increased in succession, and the social welfare benefits per capita have also been reduced in succession.

   The panel said Japan’s public burden is light. “The public” in this context includes large corporations and the wealthy people. The “upside-down” taxation system to increase the burden on the general populace and to reduce the burden on the large corporations and the wealthy presents a false image of public burdens.

   Let us drastically increase public consciousness and movements in defense of the right to live humanly that challenges the cold-blooded government policy of abandoning the socially vulnerable.                 - Akahata, June 8, 2007