Thanks to those who sent comments on the issues covered in the article.

●Codrean03/28/2023 at 10:23

Doctor, I completely agree with your statement and the sad truth behind it.

It is 2023, and Romania does not have a national health registry of all residents. If we had it, the doctor who certifies death would have a minimum of information about morbidity and treatment in the registry. Let me reproduce the evaluations of the pathologist I spoke about in the article to see how great the evil is: “As a primary pathologist, I completed numerous medical death certificates. I admit, starting with an internship, then as a specialist, I met colleagues who did not know (left it to the nurses!) to fill out the certificates; the diagnoses were incomplete, and the causes were not written down in the order of thanatogenesis. I was also surprised to learn that there are employees in the Civil Registry Office – the death department – who are uncomfortable when there are several diagnoses!.. .Therefore, I doubt that there are death certificates in Romania accurately indicate the causes of death. As an example from the family: my father-in-law was sick with cancer, but in the ascertaining certificates of the Ministry of Health, the tumor disease is not listed under either Ic or d… Maybe the social medicine courses were not interesting. for everyone, and advanced training at EMC did not include a “peripheral” topic. Not everyone is into biostatistics, and from error to error we get unrealistic reports.”

Of course, it will take a long time to change the situation, it was established for many decades due to the negligence and incompetence of those who were appointed to important positions in the field of health care on a political basis. This will change in a few more decades, and only if the Minister of Health and the Minister of Education take a number of long-term and well (hardly!) monitored measures now. Was and is the Ministry of Health somehow interested in hiding deaths from certain causes (hospital-acquired infections)?

Otherwise, we will remain a country in which mortality by real causes of death and morbidity by causes of disease will never be known. Sincerely, the author.

● Bilbophil03/28/2023 at 12:17 a.m stefan6003/28/2023 at 1:39 p.m. Your reasonable questions about the statistics of the Ministry of Labor regarding the years of work in the country before going abroad are also in the last sentence of the article.

Public pension: “People receive a pension in proportion to the period during which they worked in each country, in practice the contributions are summed up in the countries where they worked, and the pension will be determined separately for each country” (President of the National Pension House).

CAER03/28/2023 at 1:03 p.m. How life expectancy is calculated is a hypothetical “what if”. Details are in the Appendix. The term “On the contrary”: you will find the justification at the end of the article.

● Cynic03/28/2023 at 3:49 p.m. The data are obtained from Eurostat and are based on the results of the Labor Force Survey (in households), a standardized community survey. The sample is representative for all countries.

● Alexander03/28/2023 at 5:15 p.m. In the pictures below and in the comments, you will find answers to your questions and those of other commenters. You can see in Figure 3 the sad situation of pensioners in Romania in terms of the number of years they have left to live, in the context of Europe and other countries. There are also non-EU countries in the three figures to show a wide range of pension systems. All 3 numbers were not published in the article and allow us to learn new dimensions of complex differences in retirement.

●Angel03/28/2023 at 6:42 p.m. You will find detailed information about the retirement age in France in the attached file. The text is automatically translated.

●Demographer03/28/2023 at 12:59 p.m. Hello demographer. Thank you for the offer. The subject did not go unnoticed. It will be treated.

●Agora03/28/2023 at 1:44 p.m

State that “In Romania, the quality of life of the majority of the population is poor, and for 3 decades nothing has been done due to the excessive politicization of the economic, social and cultural spheres.”

Yes, unfortunately, that’s how things go. I reproduced in the article the populist statements of one minister: “…first we have to deal with the life expectancy of Romanian citizens and, above all, with the length of a healthy life, because we should not put the visa before the ox.” The political class has completely different goals, plans and priorities, and recent events have demonstrated this most eloquently. The leaders of the three parties of the ruling coalition said that they do not know what threshold for official crimes their senators voted for. Who will believe them? Tell each other, and then the Minister of Justice, the source of the €50,000 threshold proposal. There was even a proposal to double the passage barrier. Obviously, everyone knew about the €50,000 before this threshold was communicated to the Senate, but no one is saying, they are hiding how it was sent to the Senate, in what way. This is the frightening thinking, interests and priorities of the leaders of the three parties, the Minister of Justice, therefore the government and senators, the entire political class. Not a desperate call of the mentioned minister. Why so much contempt? They practiced these “exercises” and similar before and it worked for them, they got where they got. They were re-elected and will be re-elected next year, c’așa-i Romanian’, as a poet.

New information from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

The OECD, the organization on whose door Romania is also knocking, hopefully successfully, has excellent databases and publications in the fields, statistical information is produced and presented with great care and concern for comparability, which is not easy to achieve in the case of retirement age. OECD data on retirement was not included in the article to avoid introducing elements that could cause confusion and because of concerns about the size of the article. We will present them now, and we will be able to notice some differences compared to those presented in Figure 1 of the article, the content of the indicator is not identical.

The first figure shows the usual retirement age for a person who enters the labor market at the age of 20, the second one shows the actual age of leaving the labor market, and the third one shows the number of years a retiree will live (life expectancy). These are presented as figures and data for countries other than those in the European Union, which broadens the scope of comparison by also seeing data for representative countries from other continents. I have reproduced Figure 1 from the article to facilitate comparison.

The definitions of the normal retirement age and the actual retirement age provided by the OECD are specific to ensure comparability of data in areas where national laws and practices differ.

Normal retirement age it is defined as the age from which the rights to all components of the pension system are opened, allowing entry into the labor market at the age of 22 and a continuous career.

The average effective age of leaving the labor market – the average age of leaving the labor market for people aged 40 and older.

For both men and women, Romania’s normal retirement age, 65 for men and 65.4 for women, is among the highest among the countries in Figure 1, especially for women. It is significantly higher compared to developed countries, where the level of life expectancy at the age of 65 is consistently higher than ours, both for men and for women (group A). It also surpasses most of the countries of Eastern Europe (group B). The situation at the level of the effective age of leaving the labor market is not identical (Fig. 2). In general, the exit age from the labor market is lower than the normal retirement age, but the data also show frequent reverse situations. With 61.3 years, our country is at the bottom of the ranking for men, and women occupy one of the highest places – 64.6 years (number 1 in the article).

Due to the peculiarities of OECD definitions and national realities, the retirement age is higher than the retirement age, we meet men in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Bulgaria, China RP and Romania. The exceptions for women are Austria, Estonia, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey and Romania.

Number of years in retirement is the level of life expectancy upon leaving the labor market. The number of years lived as a pensioner has significantly different values ​​also in Europe and high shares (Fig. 3). The indicator depends on the age of exit from the labor market and, crucially, on the expected life expectancy at this age, which is determined by the age-related mortality rate. Romania’s position is dismal compared to both men and women – only 15 and 19 years, which is far from the EU-27 averages of 19.4 and 24 years. For men, this indicator corresponds to the low age of leaving the country. labor market, 61.3 years. High mortality and low life expectancy explain the situation. For women in the last position in figure 3, this is explained by the high level of exit age from the labor market, 64.6 years, a value among the highest in figure 2. Romania’s position is mainly determined by a high age-specific mortality rate and a correspondingly low level of life expectancy.

Looking at the values ​​in Figure 3 and the position of Romania, we can say that the retirement age in our country does not correlate with the number of years that men and women live after retirement. The controversial situation arises due to bringing the retirement age into line with European standards, rather than the level of life expectancy in all age groups, which cannot be done by law and administrative practice. It is not the retirement age that seems abnormally high, but the low life expectancy. Hence the meaning of the word “On the contrary” in the title of the article. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro