There is nothing in the 2026 budget that will work. It is a budget of inertia. It contains paradoxes, such as the one about the salaries of healthcare workers, which will be resolved by increasing the money for clinical pathways. This is absurd, because nowhere does it say how much money is spent on labor in clinical pathways. This was stated by the president of the Podkrepa Confederation, Dimitar Manolov, in the show Face to Face on bTV about the budget plan for next year, quoted by novini.bg
If we look globally, the healthcare financing system has almost killed it. The issue was resolved hastily and piecemeal, and there are many unclear things in it. When an issue is resolved within a crisis, most often the solution is incorrect, he explained.
What will most likely happen is that these increased social security contributions will be compensated by an increase in wages. This increase in pension contributions is a timid restoration of the levels that existed many years ago. Pension insurance and the Social Security Fund were deprived of 1/4 of their own revenues, and fell into heavy dependence on the budget, Manolov explained.
In 2000, before the pogrom on the Social Security Fund began, it had its own reserve in the amount of one pension payment, and now half of its budget is almost in deficit. This is not much of a drama. Another question is whether this could have been done in another way – The pension contribution could have been increased by 2 tenths of a point within 5, 6, 10 years in the same way as the retirement age is increased and no one would have noticed it. This is an inertial budget. This approach in the long term cannot lead to positive results. It is good that the serious backlogs will be caught up, said the union leader.
We are concerned that another opportunity was missed to correct a series of anomalies in the payment of a series of categories of employees in the administration. There were threats to carry out a functional analysis of ministries and agencies. However, nothing has been done, Dimitar Manolov pointed out.
According to him, according to an analysis by the Council of Ministers for the same position in the administration, the discrepancies in payments reach up to five times. According to him, the pay system in the state administration must be fundamentally changed.
The budget must be redrawn in order to support it, but then employers will not support it, the leader of the "Podkrepa" Labor Union admitted.