2023-07-22 16:45:11
On Calle Campomanes in Madrid there are two hotels and a bookstore specializing in texts in several languages. Just opposite, at number 10, lived the first years of him Fausto Baño. Born in 1940, he is doctor, retired, and breaks a cliché: he does not have a large retirement pension. In fact, has no pension. Baño is one of the 150 doctors that the Foundation for Social Protection of the Collegiate Medical Organization helps to make ends meet with an economic benefit. In his case, 1,330 euros “that do not give for many luxuries”, he explains, but enough tranquility to live. Even more so when you run out savings that he has left, that he calculates that he they will last “two or three more years”.
What happened for a doctor who has always practiced in Spain do not have a retirement pension and live with help? Baño was born with a vocation for assistance: “If a friend fell when we were children, I would always go to help them,” he recalls. And he did not give up on his efforts until graduated with a medical degree in 1964. At 24 years old, degree in hand, she searched for a specialty. “Then there was no MIR”, clarifies. “You specialized by signing up to a hospital Service, where you were under the tutelage of the director of that specialty, that accredited you as such following two years of training”. So he studied two specialties, first traumatology under the direction of Ángel Garaizábal; following, Rheumatology. To this he added extra training in acupuncture at the University of Granada and vertebral chiropractic at the current Hospital 12 de Octubre. “I tried to always be advanced in treatments for my patients,” he asserts.
It was there that he began his career as a doctor, almost always away from public health, where he did not agree with the facilities that the State gave to practice medicine. “Had two clinics that I own”. The first in Leganés, San Cosme Clinicwhere he worked as a traumatologist for work accidents, with great activity thanks to the “construction boom” in the south of Madrid in the early 70s. The second, following closing the previous one due to the outdated scales and the lack of economic sustainability, in one of the most privileged areas of Madrid: Diego de León. Opened in 1978, the Transvital Clinic was focused on Rheumatology, “with special treatments that were not seen at that time, such as galvanic baths or a CO2 laser” which, in Baño’s opinion, turned his health center “into the best clinic of this type in Madrid, and one of the most important in Spain.”
Baño also relies on some savings that he estimates will be exhausted in two or three years
That adventure lasted until 1994, as he explains that the economic crisis stopped many contracts with insurerswhich, according to what he points out, made a business that had been open for 14 years with a staff of five doctors, nurses unsustainable… “At that time, the dismissal meant a month and a half of salary per year worked and the truth is that those indemnities left me in the bones ”, acknowledges Baño regarding one of his great economic setbacks. And it is that to deal with said dismissals, he had to empty his private retirement insurance.
However, this doctor-entrepreneur (as he calls himself) did not stop and embarked on a new adventure in Lanzarotewhere he moved his health technology to start a new clinic that was active for two years. “I returned to Madrid because my mother was already older and I sold all the devices to a doctor there”, he recalls regarding a process where all this equipment, being ‘second-hand’, lost 75% of its value.
To all this career path we must add a key fact: until 1995, doctors were not required to contribute as self-employed, as explained to this medium by sources of the Spanish medical unionism. It was only necessary to be registered in the Tax on Economic Activities (IAE), which implied the payment of a rate, and with this it might already be exercised but of course, without contributing to a future public pension.
Job instability as a doctor
But let’s go back to history, to Madrid. It is 1996, political change in Spain, José María Aznar takes over from Felipe González in Moncloa and Baño undertakes a change (or return) of life. “I began to stumble as a contracted doctor in various centers in the capital, from clinics to nursing homes”, he explains regarding that time. A time in which he achieved some stability in a center until he retired at the age of 74. In fact, he is honorary member of the College of Physicians of Madridas confirmed by this institution.
Since then, the aforementioned economic benefit from the WTO, those dwindling savings and the sale of the family apartment in Madrid they have allowed him to subsist with a life that Baño admits is modest. A reality that does not make him regret anything he has done: “I don’t know if I would change anything in my life because I have been and am in love with Medicine,” he clarifies. His farewell phrase leaves no doubt: “It wasn’t work, it was enjoyment.”
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