Sunday February 19, 2023 | 2:00 p.m.
The National Congress will try to hold at least one session in both chambers before the end of February and the end of the extraordinary session. The idea is to show at least one photo of the legislators sitting on their benches in the compound before President Alberto Fernández opens the regular session on March 1.
Both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate began to activate the operation ‘one before the end of the month’ to avoid repeating the image of last summer, in which the extraordinary sessions were conspicuous by their absence.
The Chamber of Senators with an official majority has it easier and the session will be held next Thursday. But in the Chamber of Deputies, in which the numbers of the Frente de Todos bench are not enough to enable the session, the meeting will take place as long as 12 legislators from other blocks can be seated on their benches.
For this reason, from the Frente de Todos they are trying to obtain the accompaniment of the deputies of the left bloc, of the United Provinces -in which are the missionary deputies Diego Sartori and Carlos Fernández- and of the Federal to achieve the necessary quorum that allow a session to be held on the last day of February.
The panorama is more complicated in the Lower House, due to the decision of the Juntos por el Cambio interblock not to give a quorum to parliamentary activity while the impeachment process against the four judges that make up the Supreme Court continues.
In Deputies, the political trial monopolized much of the time invested during the period of extraordinary sessions. Last Thursday, the commission led by the Kirchnerist Carolina Gaillard defined the schedule for summoning witnesses and requests for documentation.
The ruling party managed to rule, days ago, the project that activates a “tech” monotribute, which targets service workers related to the knowledge economy with incomes of up to US$ 30,000 per year.
Of the 28 projects that President Alberto Fernández authorized to discuss before March 1, at this point in the party, none of them managed to see the light of becoming law. That is why the official intention is to achieve the consolation prize of showing even an extraordinary session with an ‘extra small’ agenda that ensures its approval.
“The more the topics are expanded, the more difficult it will be to achieve a quorum,” they explain from the Frente de Todos bloc to justify an agenda of two projects as a tentative work plan for the February 28 session.
That is why the Frente de Todos seeks to convince the most friendly blocks with a very limited agenda. It would be a session to move forward with just two projects: the pension debt payment plan known as the pension moratorium and an initiative that seeks the implementation of the single national program for computerization and digitization of medical records throughout the country.
pension moratorium
The pension moratorium project seeks to approve a payment plan in installments so that nearly 800,000 people who do not have sufficient contributions to access their retirement can achieve it.
The proposal, presented by Senator Anabel Fernández Sagasti and with a medium sanction in the upper house, establishes that people of retirement age but without the required contributions will be able to regularize missing periods up to and including December 2008, with a modality of payment in installments that will be deducted directly from the retirement credit obtained through the program.
Likewise, it contemplates the possibility that people of pre-retirement age (women from 50 to 59 years old and men from 55 to 64 years old) who know that they will not arrive with the necessary years of contributions, can anticipate and begin to pay the missing periods themselves. .
Digital medical records
The second project to be debated in Deputies seeks to create a national program that digitizes the medical records of all patients in the same system that allows them to be viewed from any medical center in the country. The system allows patients and health professionals access to a database of relevant clinical information for the health care of each person from anywhere in the national territory.
The initiative, which was included in the agenda for the special session and which already has the approval of the Senate, provides for the creation of the Single National Program for Computerization and Digitization of Medical Records of Argentina.
The norm establishes that the software must be installed free of charge in all public, national, provincial and municipal hospitals and in private health centers and social security to allow the unification of all this information.
The initiative also contemplates that technical and financial assistance will be given to the provinces so that they can comply with this legal obligation.
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