JCP’s emergency 1 trillion yen plan for welfare services is first step toward ending poverty

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

   “I want to eat an Onigiri (rice ball)” was the last words a 52-year-old man left in his diary before he died unattended in Kitakyushu City in Fukuoka Prefecture. The tragedy came just two months after the city authority in April stopped paying him welfare benefits that he had received since late 2006. He was found dead on July 10, about 30 days after his death.

   It was last spring that Kitakyushu City stopped paying him the monthly welfare benefits. He was a former taxi driver who quit his job due to an internal organ disorder. The city had told him to find a job. In the diary, the man wrote, “I was told to work despite my inability to work.”

   Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s Cabinet tries to emphasize the need for “securing employment instead of extending welfare benefits.” This is but a pretext for cutting off welfare assistance, including benefits to mother-child households. A document submitted to the Council on Economic and fiscal Policy by Chief Cabinet Secretary Shiozaki Yasuhisa called for cutbacks in welfare allowances to mother-child households.

   By implementing policies that increase poverty, the ruling Liberal Democratic and Komei parties have reneged on their own promise to value “welfare”. They are responsible for the debasement of administrative welfare services and for the loss of lives.

   The number of people who are barred from receiving medical services due to government cutbacks is increasing. They are “refugees” of a new kind. As weekly magazines recently reported, the cutbacks are tantamount to forcing “poor people to choose to die.”

   In the area of nursing care services, many people are denied access to minimum services, including home care and nursing facility care, that are essential to live a life with dignity. Last year, the government decided to drastically reduce the number of nursing care beds for elderly people who need medical treatment at nursing homes. A National Diet Library report expressed concern that the government measure could create “nursing care refugees.”

   Social welfare services are indispensable to deal with the increase in poverty, but cutbacks in services and increases in people’s burdens for services are prevalent in every area.

   As a first step to resolve this problem, the Japanese Communist Party has proposed the following “one trillion yen emergency plan for welfare services.”

(1)    The National Health Insurance tax should be reduced by 10,000 yen per person and local governments should stop invalidating the National Health Insurance cards of those who are in arrears in payment of the health insurance tax;

(2)    The nursing care insurance tax as well as the user fees for services should be lowered or exempted for needy people, and the quality of nursing care for needy people and the quality of nursing care services to guarantee humane living conditions should be preserved;

(3)    A national standard should be established for free medical services for pre-school children.

(4)    Protect the living conditions and rights of handicapped people through revocation of the present principle requiring handicapped people to pay for services according to their ability to pay under the law for the promotion of their self-support.

(5)    Stop cutbacks in public assistance to households that are below the poverty level and in the allowance for mother-child households.

   All these points are in response to the demands put forward by grassroots movements of residents, and some of them have already been implemented in some local governments. There is no reason for the government to say it cannot implement them.

   The government should not be allowed to say it cannot afford to use 1 trillion yen to carry out these measures. In fact, it is going to pay 3 trillion yen for the U.S. military realignment in Japan and give the business sector a several trillion yen corporation tax cut. The 1 trillion yen that we are demanding accounts for only two percent of the 50 trillion yen earmarked for implementing government policies.

   Let’s achieve a major JCP advance in the House of Councilors election so that the JCP’s urgent call for a “1 trillion yen emergency plan for welfare services” can be realized.                         - Akahata, July 14, 2007