(KBS 1TV Live Broadcast. Broadcast Promotional Version. November 12, 2018) [Uhm Kyung-chul's Late-Night Debate] A Complete Reconsideration of the National Pension — How? (Posted September 5, 2026)

(Based on the deliberations of the Fourth

National Pension Financial Estimation Committee in 2018,

the government—that is, the Ministry of Health and Welfare—

drew up a National Pension overhaul plan, which

President Moon Jae-in, then in office,

sent back with instructions

that it be reconsidered.

On November 9, 2018,

Professor Kim Yeon-myeong of Chung-Ang University

was appointed Senior Secretary to the President for Social Affairs

in the Moon Jae-in administration.

The government's overhaul plan

was sent back to the Ministry of Health and Welfare

with instructions to reconsider it,

and that return

is the subject

of this debate.

In the debate, which was conducted live,

the chair of the Health and Welfare Committee

of the 20th National Assembly, Kim Se-yeon,

drew on projection data submitted at the time

by the Ministry of Health and Welfare

to show that the National Pension's cumulative deficit

came to 17,000 trillion won.

And,

in the appendix to the 2018 OECD

Korea Survey Report,

there was a forecast

that population aging

would drive Korea's central government debt ratio

to a level of 200% of GDP;

he presented that too.

Even though that was our situation,

President Moon Jae-in,

saying that the public disliked it,

sent the plan to raise contributions

straight back

to the Ministry of Health and Welfare.)

■ Program: Uhm Kyung-chul's Late-Night Debate
■ Debate Topic: A Complete Reconsideration of the National Pension — How?

■ Broadcast Date and Time: Saturday, November 10, 2018, 10:30–11:40 p.m., KBS 1TV

■ Key Content
- Ki Dong-min (Member of the National Assembly, Democratic Party of Korea)
"Completing National Pension reform through public consent and social consensus"

- Kim Se-yeon (Member of the National Assembly, Liberty Korea Party)
"Let Us Not Be Bad Adults!"

- Oh Gun-ho (Chair of the Steering Committee, Welfare State I Make)
"The National Pension is a system in which we decide now and future generations pay later!
We must hold this debate with the children of the future in mind"

- Yun Suk-myung (Research Fellow, Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs)
"Pension reform is as hard as moving a heavy elephant,
but for the sake of future generations it simply must be done!"

▷ Uhm Kyung-chul: Today's topic is the National Pension overhaul. On few issues, in fact, are there as many views as there are people. Experts differ, and ordinary citizens are worlds apart too.

Opinions vary enormously by age, by generation, by occupation, by where each person stands. So today's program will be less a for-and-against debate than something closer to a public hearing, in which we listen to a broad range of expert views.

The president has issued a directive for a wholesale overhaul of the National Pension. No clear rationale for it has emerged, but the word going around is that the plan does not meet the public's standards.

Part of that must be the sheer strength of public resistance to raising contributions, and part of it the sheer sensitivity of the issue; either way, the talk of a complete reconsideration is having considerable repercussions.

Representative Ki Dong-min, how do you see it?

▶ Ki Dong-min: It means he regards the situation as that serious. The public feels a great deal of anxiety about the National Pension, and there is distrust as well. And there have been occasions when the executive branch failed to handle it properly.

He has been receiving briefings all along, and I imagine he has arrived at some new judgments. As you know, the National Pension has now been with us for exactly 30 years

since it was introduced. In the West there are places where it has been in operation for more than 100 years and people are used to pensions; here, the number of people actually drawing one is still small, and some of this comes out of that environment.

Compared with the past, though, people do seem to be giving the pension credit little by little for its positive side, and I have the sense that the tendency to notice its merits is growing.

But if I try to infer why he asked for another look at it, I think the public is still thinking, just as came up at the top of the program, "Isn't this just paying more and receiving less?"

Or, "I paid in diligently while I was young, but will I even be able to collect properly when I am old?" That kind of anxiety, I think, is there.

I take it as a question about whether proper means of dispelling that anxiety have in fact been prepared. And since, as he has kept stressing, he insists on public consent and social consensus, surely the point is that those steps have to be taken properly.

So all I can surmise is that he is telling the government to go through those steps properly — to report to the National Assembly, to hold the debate there, to act responsibly — without rushing, and with due regard for how the public feels.

▶ Kim Se-yeon: On the National Pension, I do not think it will do for any one generation to shift the burden onto the next in a one-sided way.

Yet look at the debate as it stands: on the paying-in side, contributions stay within a very limited range — holding to the status quo, or paying a little more at most — while on the receiving side, as beneficiaries, people want to be paid more later. That is only human nature, is it not?

If we design and run the system so that it is one-sidedly favorable to the present generation, then over the next 30 or 40 years, while the fund is piling up — while the accumulated balance climbs toward something like 1,800 trillion won — we will pass a happy stretch of time; but from the moment that point is behind us, a deeply painful time will begin.

I believe we have to hold this debate with future generations in mind — above all the children of ours who have not yet been born.

▶ Oh Gun-ho: Listening to the president's remarks, I personally found them thoroughly disconcerting.

He spoke of the public's standards, but then I could not for the life of me picture what a pension reform that met the president's own standards would look like.

Because as things stand the National Pension's contributions already fall far short of what it pays out. And on top of that the president campaigned on raising the income replacement rate.

So there is a further factor weighing on contributions that are already inadequate; and yet, according to press reports, the matter of a contribution increase seems to have made him uncomfortable even at the presidential office briefing. Without addressing a contribution increase, how is that additional increase to be handled?

Of course I understand that he was mindful of the public's discomfort. But to my mind the contributions under the current National Pension system, burdensome as they certainly are, are more than a burden: they are a responsibility our generation has to discharge, measured against what we stand to receive.

What I wanted was for the president to say: "My fellow citizens, it is truly regrettable that this is a burden, but for the sake of coexistence with future generations, let us discharge this responsibility." He should have redirected the channel of debate from burden to persuasion; instead, the president said nothing of persuasion and ended up stressing the burden, and I thought, oh no, pension politics is going to get tangled from here on — will an answer ever come? It left me quite disconcerted.

▷ Uhm Kyung-chul: The three of you have each said something different.

▶ Yun Suk-myung: These do not look like questions that admit of simple answers.

Dr. Oh and I both took part as members of the National Pension System Development Committee, the body that drew up the institutional improvement plan now under dispute.

Looking at what has been going on around the National Pension in our society lately, one can infer indirectly just how much of a hot potato the National Pension is here,

and one wonders whether there is not that wide a gap between what experts agonize over in terms of the pension's sustainability and intergenerational equity, and the way the matter is viewed in the political arena, from the standpoint of ordinary citizens.

What we are seeing appears to be an expression of that concern; and at a time like this, even when I look at cases abroad, there do not seem to be many clear-cut, sharply defined solutions.

From an expert's standpoint, the best way to resolve this problem in the end is

to keep explaining to the public, over and over, in the most politically neutral, transparent, and unambiguous way, the environment surrounding the National Pension and the problems inherent in the system,

and asking: this is the situation we are living through, so how might we find the greatest common denominator here? On that point, I would like to see the experts and the political sphere put in some effort.

(Because the full YouTube video is set so that it cannot be posted on other sites,

the relevant scenes have been captured and attached as an appendix.)

https://news.kbs.co.kr/news/mobile/view/view.do?ncd=4071719