On 1 January 2025, 19,709 pensioners lived in Ungheni district — more than one in four inhabitants. Their pension, like every visit to the family doctor in Cornești, Sculeni or Pârlița, comes from two national funds that together ran nearly 67 billion lei through the system last year. Parliament’s specialist committees reviewed the execution reports for these funds on Monday. The figures sound reassuring — the pension fund closed the year “in the black.” Read carefully, though, they reveal an ever harder arithmetic and a trap that lies in wait above all for Ungheni’s rural residents.
A “surplus” on paper, a hole in reality
The state social insurance budget (BASS) — the fund from which pensions and most social benefits are paid — collected revenues of 49.2 billion lei in 2025 and spent 49.1 billion, closing the year with a surplus of 122.8 million lei. On paper, the system looks healthy.
Except the balance is borrowed. Of all the fund’s revenues, the contributions paid by employees and employers accounted for 58.9%; the remaining 41.1% — more than 20 billion lei — came as a transfer from the state budget. In other words, without the money paid in from the budget, the pension fund would not come close to covering its payouts. The announced surplus exists because the state plugs the hole in advance.
The underlying cause was stated openly by the head of the institution that manages the money.
We now have 1.18 workers covering the pension of a single pensioner. Elena Țîbîrnă, director of the National Social Insurance Office
The international standard that healthy pension systems aim for is four to five workers per pensioner. Moldova has slipped to just over one. Across the country, 433,500 payers supported, through their contributions, benefits for nearly 1.2 million recipients. This is the ratio that explains why, year after year, the state budget has to pour billions into the pension fund — and why any demographic crisis is felt in it directly.
The demographic scissors are sharpest in Ungheni
This is where the local part comes in, and it too is hard. In 2014, Ungheni district had 96,292 inhabitants. At the start of 2025 it has 74,507 — a fall of almost 23% in a decade, according to preliminary data from the National Bureau of Statistics. Those who left were, above all, working-age people — the young and the adults who should have been tomorrow’s contributors.
The number of pensioners, by contrast, has barely moved — from 20,530 in 2019 to 19,709 now. The arithmetic result is merciless: if a few years ago about one in five inhabitants was a pensioner, today it is more than one in four. The scissors between those who pay into the system and those who draw from it are closing faster here than the national average.
The age structure confirms the picture. Children under 14 (15,516) and people over 60 (18,259) together make up 45.3% of the district — almost half. These are exactly the categories the state supports: through a pension, through benefits, or through health insurance paid from the budget. And those still working have it harder than it seems: the average gross monthly wage in the district in 2024 was 11,321 lei, so the national average old-age pension (4,424 lei) barely reaches 39% of it.
Who actually pays for Ungheni’s hospital
The second fund, FAOAM, keeps the health system alive. In 2025 it collected revenues of 17.49 billion lei and insured 2,463,548 people. Here the redistribution is even more visible. Only 30.8% of the insured were covered through an employer; 63.8% — almost two thirds — are insured by the state, that is, from public money: children, pupils, students, pensioners, persons with disabilities. And what each one pays differs enormously.
On average, in 2025, an employee paid 12,512 lei a year into the health fund. The state paid 4,565 lei for every person it insures. And someone who bought their own policy paid, on average, 2,732 lei. In effect, the employee contributes almost five times more than the individually insured person, and the reserve bank of the entire system is the state budget.
For a district like Ungheni — ageing, largely rural, with many pensioners and children and relatively few salaried workers at companies — the conclusion is clear, however uncomfortable for local pride: structurally, the district takes more out of the health fund than it puts in. Ungheni District Hospital and the network of health centres run on money pooled together, in large part from the contributions of salaried workers in the country’s economic hubs. One concrete example: in October 2025, the clinical laboratory and the functional diagnostics department of the Ungheni Health Centre were renovated with 1.8 million lei in CNAM funds.
The 2,527-lei policy trap
Here is the most useful part to know — and the one that hits Ungheni’s profile precisely. The law does not let you choose whether or not to insure yourself. If you are not employed and do not fall into the state-insured categories, you are obliged to buy your own policy. The list of those concerned reads as if drawn on the map of a farming district:
- owners of agricultural land;
- founders of peasant and individual enterprises;
- patent holders, lessees and lessors;
- the self-employed and people in independent professions.
For 2026, the fixed insurance premium is 12,636 lei. But whoever pays by 31 March gets an 80% discount and pays only 2,527 lei — the rural categories, including landowners, fall here. Those who miss the deadline pay the full premium, plus a penalty of 0.1% for each day of delay.
The stakes are not bureaucratic. An uninsured person receives free of charge only pre-hospital emergency care, primary care at the family doctor and treatment for a few diseases with an impact on public health. For a planned hospitalisation, an elective surgical operation or costly investigations, they pay out of their own pocket — sums that far exceed the price of a policy.
And yet many choose the risk. According to the Court of Accounts report on the execution of FAOAM 2025, cited by the economic press, about 142,000 people legally required to do so did not buy a policy last year — over 136,000 of them owners of agricultural land. The health fund thus lost almost 187 million lei. There is no breakdown by district, but it is hard to imagine that a district with Ungheni’s profile — 63% rural, full of small landowners — does not contribute heavily to this gap. Even the report reviewed in parliament acknowledges the problem openly: the state has “difficulties in tracking, identifying and notifying the persons required to insure themselves individually.”
What the report leaves unsaid
The execution reports offer a clear national X-ray, but they stop at the district border. How many people in Ungheni actually bought a policy, how many were left out, how many pensioners the Territorial Social Insurance Office serves and at what average pension — these figures are not published by district. Nor had the Court of Accounts’ full ruling on the execution of FAOAM 2025 been published by the time the committees met, so the specific shortcomings for 2025 remain, for now, stated only in general terms.
Triunghi.md will request these data from CNAM’s West territorial directorate and the Territorial Social Insurance Office in Ungheni, and will return with the district figures. Until then, one thing is certain and is up to every household: if you have land, a peasant farm or a patent and are not insured by the state, the 31 March deadline is the difference between 2,527 and 12,636 lei.
This article is based on parliament’s statement of 16 June 2026 on the execution reports of the social and health funds for 2025, on official data from the National Bureau of Statistics and CNAS for Ungheni district, on CNAM’s rules on the 2026 insurance premium, and on public statements by CNAS management. The figure of 142,000 uninsured comes from the Court of Accounts report cited by the economic press and will be verified against the primary document once it is published. The cover is a symbolic image generated with artificial intelligence.