Greeks Lining Up for Social Services Feel Pain of Cash Crunch
An elderly woman at a farmer's market in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Photographer: Konstantinos Tsakalidis/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
In the halls of the IKA state-welfare center on a recent rainy day in the Athens suburb of Neos Kosmos, Katerina Dimas and her eight-year-old son had front-row seats in the drama of Greece’s cash crunch.
The 33-year-old hairdresser and her boy had spent three days trying to get her healthcare coverage renewed by IKA, which provides social security for 5.5 million Greeks and retirement benefits for 830,000 pensioners. The duo, who had arrived at the center at 6:00 a.m., were sitting in a corridor on a floor below where they needed to be because the crush of retirees and other people had left no room upstairs at the center run by Greece’s biggest pension fund.