If you read the attached GSIS response to complaints against the eCard, it is plain to see how they are totally out of touch with reality.
With all due respect, Ms. Enriqueta P. Disuanco, GSIS executive VP for operations, try as she might, has really nothing substantial to say about the total meltdown of this ill-conceived plan that collectively punishes pensioners in order to rid the system of scammers.
The GSIS' response to the New York City enrollment disaster was to send more people, at the pension fund's expense, to the United States on what amounts to a junket. And have they really improved their processes? The answer to that is a long list of the same complaints from pensioners, some of which you may read for yourself through the links we have provided when you scroll down this blog.
Technology is supposed to make people's lives better. By this measure, the eCard program is a totally scatological product of Winston Garcia's mind that he has imposed on the pensioners without any thought of its harsh effects on the ailing and elderly pensioners.
The eCard's stated goal is to make it easier for people to receive their pension checks but the opposite is happening. Pensioners are being made to jump through hoops to obtain the excretable eCard. And once they do finally get it, they are left with a card that not all banks in the Philippines would honor.
By making it extremely difficult to obtain their pension, is the real GSIS agenda here to make people give up in the face of the enormous bureaucratic red tape that Garcia has set up so that their pension would help line up the pockets of some corrupt politicians and petty bureaucratic tyrants?
The eCard requires pensioners to make a yearly trip to the kiosks, a heavy financial and physical burden on their part, to prove that they are still alive. Even the most tecnologically advanced country in the world, which is the United States, has not experimented on its pensioners in this inhumane manner. And the reason for this is obvious: pensioners' money cannot be witheld for such a prolonged period of time as the GSIS has done because pension is money already earned by a lifetime of service to the nation.
It is sacred money that they had won through blood, sweat and tears. No one in his right mind should tinker with it for any reason --- as Garcia has so blightly taken liberty with doing.
But Garcia is totally oblivious to these fine points that separate decent humanity from their relatives residing at the Manila Zoo.
