ANALYSIS Illegal shelters in Bihor and the rest of the iceberg: what the official figures actually tell us

Viorel Pașca has transitioned in the public space from "The Good Samaritan from Bihor", the philanthropist who cares for "the forgotten people", to the leader of a "network of illegal nursing homes" accused by DIICOT of exploiting hundreds of vulnerable people. The change in tone of the press is spectacular, but the case of the nursing homes in Bihor actually says more about the Romanian state than about a single person: about how Romania ages, about the real capacity of the long-term care system, and about the role of the network of homes – mostly private – that operate with licenses and substantial support from public funds.

From "the angel with a human face" to "the houses of horror"

In recent years, Pașca has been consistently portrayed as a social hero. Digi24 dedicated to him in 2018 the report "The Story of the Good Samaritan from Bihor. In 13 years, over 2000 people have been cared for by Viorel Pașca", with images of him washing and cutting the hair of the sick, presented as the man who found shelter for "over 2000 people forgotten by family and state". The Bihorean wrote in 2021 about "Alone in Death", documenting the cemetery of "the forgotten people" in Dumbrava and emphasizing that Pașca cares for hundreds of people without any other safety net. Oradea24 called him, in 2023, "the angel with a human face", "the Bihorean who cared for over 2,500 people", while Gândul presented him as "the good Samaritan from Dumbrava", allowing him to mock the inspections ("they photographed two flies, they searched my cellar") and publishing at the end the IBAN accounts of the association. In 2025, eBihoreanul headlined "Conclusions of the inspection at Dumbrava (...) "The Good Samaritan" Viorel Pașca did not break any laws", explicitly using the result of an administrative check to validate his innocence.

After the DIICOT raids, the same character appears in headlines like "the houses of horror from Bihor", "the network of illegal nursing homes led by Bihorean Viorel Pașca", "Horrors under a humanitarian mask", "hundreds of people buried in the fields", and publications construct profiles like "Who is Viorel Pașca, the 'Good Samaritan' from Bihor accused of keeping thousands of elderly people in miserable conditions for pensions and donations". It is only apparently a change of tone from "white" to "black". In reality, the narrative shifts from "the man who does the state's job" to the question "how did the state come to tolerate a parallel system around one person?". And to this question, the official figures respond.

Romania that ages: the underlying pressure

The national strategy for long-term care and active aging for 2023–2030 starts from a clear demographic diagnosis: the proportion of the elderly population (65+) is rapidly increasing and is estimated to reach about 27.7% of the adult population by 2030. The document states that the aging population leads to an increase in the number of elderly people requiring health and social care, including long-term care.

The strategy defines clear principles: person-centered care, individualized assistance and care plans, prioritizing support for home and community care, support for informal caregivers. The announced investments target day centers, home care units, and community services, funded by PNRR and local and central budgets.

But the strategy implicitly recognizes something that in places like Dumbrava is seen concretely: Romania produces more dependent elderly than it can comfortably manage within the formal long-term care system. In the absence of sufficient and well-distributed capacity, the need "overflows" towards informal solutions – family, neighbors, parishes – and towards parallel networks, licensed or not, that fill the gaps left by the state.

What the licensed system can lead to

The best starting point for the official dimension is the data communicated by the Ministry of Labor to Economedia in July 2023: in the Unique Electronic Register of social services, there were 759 licensed nursing homes for the elderly, of which 639 were private, and 120 belonged to public providers (DGASPCs and local authorities). Public homes benefit from annual allocations from the state budget through DGASPC, while private homes operate as businesses or as non-profit entities that depend on fees, donations, and, under certain conditions, subsidies.

For other types of services – centers for adults with disabilities, day services, sheltered housing – the Ministry of Labor and ANPD publish the general register of licensed social services and the structure of accredited providers. As of May 8, 2026, a document from the ministry shows that there are 1,510 public social service providers (39%) and 2,371 private providers (61%), indicating a numerical predominance of the private sector in the licensed offer.

At the local level, the activity reports of DGASPCs and ANPIS indicate high occupancy rates: residential centers for the elderly and for adults with disabilities often operate at 90–100% capacity, with persistent waiting lists. The Ombudsman notes, for example, that in some counties, there are only 202 places in residential centers for adults with disabilities reported to the county's population, leaving a significant number of people outside the institutional system.

From this data, a simple picture emerges: the licensed offer exists and is predominantly private, but operates almost at capacity, in the conditions of an expanding elderly population. The space between real need and available places becomes, structurally, a "no man's land" where improvised formulas, "paper" centers, and unlicensed nursing homes inevitably appear.

2026: more homes, the same logic

The MMSS list of licensed nursing homes for the elderly as of June 10, 2026 shows that the network has continued to grow and reached 795 licensed homes (code 8730 CR-V-I). Compared to the snapshot from July 2023, this list suggests an increase of 36 homes in less than three years, from 759 to 795. At first glance at the register, the expansion does not seem to have changed the nature of the system. On the contrary, counties like Ilfov, Bihor, Cluj, or Constanța show a high density of private providers, sometimes with multiple centers operated by the same entity.

This continuity is important. If after the "houses of horror" in Ilfov, in 2023, the public reaction was that the state would clean up the system, the data from 2026 rather indicates a consolidation of the same model: more centers, but within the same structural logic, with the private sector dominant and the state in the role of funder, licensor, and controller – that is, exactly the actor that failed to prevent the major scandals.

The care business: profit, subsidies, public money

The analysis by Frames taken up by Economedia in 2023 shows that the businesses of companies with CAEN code 8730 (activities of nursing homes for the elderly and social homes) have exploded in recent years. The cumulative turnover of these companies increased from 4.61 million lei in 2008 to 156.6 million lei in 2021 and 206 million lei in 2022, while profit rose to 45.7 million lei. The number of active companies reached 223 in 2022, with a significant concentration in Bucharest, Ilfov, Timiș, Argeș, and Constanța. In parallel, the state has significantly increased funding for the program subsidizing private social services without profit. At the request of Economedia, the Ministry of Labor specified that the total budget of the program rose in 2023 to 117.5 million lei, compared to 26.7 million lei in 2022, and that 74,666,623 lei (approximately 64%) were allocated to social services for the elderly. The amount was increased after the average value of the monthly subsidy had not been updated since 2008, being established by HG 578/2022.

Important: the regulations specify that only non-profit private providers – associations, foundations, cults – can receive these subsidies directly from the state budget or from local budgets, in addition to their own resources. The average monthly subsidy level is around 1,000 lei/person for services with accommodation and 600 lei/person for services without accommodation. Commercial private businesses do not enter this scheme, although they benefit indirectly from the environment created by the state and from the fact that public places are insufficient.

The aggregate result is a mixed ecosystem:

the public network of homes and centers, undersized and under pressure;

the licensed private/nonprofit network, numerically predominant, partially fed by public money;

the parallel networks – legal but below standards, and illegal – that absorb the demand that neither the public nor the formal private sector can cover.

The structural gap in which informal networks insert themselves

Against the backdrop of this system, the Pașca case does not appear as an isolated moral accident, but as a typical product of a structural gap. The long-term care strategy recognizes that home and community care must be supported, but the infrastructure for informal care – relatives, neighbors, parishes – remains, de facto, improvised. When a rural community like Dumbrava offers, through a charismatic actor, an "empire of goodness" for hundreds of people without family, the state may be tempted to look the other way: social pressure decreases, complaints disperse, and responsibility is tacitly transferred to the "Good Samaritan". Subsequent statements by officials do not contradict this logic. Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan says, on TVR 1, that he "knows what he saw from public information" and that the Government has approved emergency aid for relocating people from the "illegal homes", but does not explicitly discuss years of institutional tolerance. Journalist Carla Tănasie summarizes this background in a formulation that has gone viral: "Viorel Pașca was allowed by the Romanian state to operate illegally because he was doing the job that the state was not able to do."

Official figures indirectly support this statement:

the elderly population is increasing and, along with it, the prevalence of the need for long-term care the licensed offer is insufficient and unevenly distributed, with centers at maximum capacity and counties with very few places; the state injects tens of millions of lei annually into the private/nonprofit care sector, but fails to eliminate gray areas and "black" centers. In this context, the fact that a network of improvised, unlicensed nursing homes could operate for years with hundreds of beneficiaries no longer seems like a shocking exception, but rather the consequence of a system that relies, in practice, on "emergency solutions" – including illegal ones – when there is no room in the official structures.

****Summary created with the help of a data monitoring flow provided by the media monitoring platform NewsVibe Romania. The analysis, data, and images presented have been enhanced with the help of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence tools.