With two meters – two weights the health benefits of e-EFKA – What applies to the funeral expenses

By Dimitris Katsaganis

E-EFKA pays dissimilar expenses to the insured, although this concerns the same reason as it relates to its non-pension expenses. And that’s because Different rules for health benefits for policyholders still apply depending on the fund to which they belong.

Although from 2017, when all the funds (IKA, OAEE, OGA, etc.) joined the e-EFKA, the Katrougalos insurance law provided for the unification of the rules for all benefits, this unification took place only for pensions.

The consolidation for health benefits (sickness allowance, funeral expenses, etc.) has been pending for 5 years. However, the Deputy Minister of Social Security, Mr. Panos Tsakloglou has publicly stated that the direction in which the government is moving is “the convergence of benefits with a budget-neutral footprint, with the less” privileged “former funds, which have the vast majority of insured, to lead to a small increase in their benefits, while scenarios are being considered in order to redistribute resources in order to place more emphasis on some areas of expenditure than others ”.

The case of funeral expenses is indicative. According to his valid information Capital.gr There is a huge discrepancy – according to data for the period from July to December 2020 – between the amounts paid by e-EFKA to the beneficiary relatives of the deceased of the insured for this reason.

For example, the average expenditure on funeral expenses of the formerly insured Ika amounts to 307 euros while the average expenditure on funeral expenses of the formerly insured ΕΤΑΠ-ΜΜΕ amounts to 1,960 euros. Therefore the average cost for funeral expenses in the former ETAP-MME is almost 7 times compared to the corresponding cost in the former IKA.

The average cost – as shown in the table below – is broken down by fund as follows:

1. ETAP-SME (EUR 1,960)

2.EBRD (EUR 1,679)

3. Joined funds (EUR 1,392)

4. Public (EUR 982)

5. OGA (795 euros)

6. OAEE (EUR 760)

7. NAT (EUR 688)

8 IKA (307 euros)

More specifically, the distribution of an average amount of decisions per former Social Security Institution is as follows:

The paradox is that although based on the above table the majority of funeral expenses (36%) relate to the former IKA, given that the vast majority of policyholders are employees in the private sector, the average amount given for funeral expenses for the dying insured is the lowest (307 euros), well below the average (521 euros).