Despite the statements of President Gustavo Petro, who has repeatedly said that the country’s health system is “one of the worst in the world,” the data contradicts his assessments on this matter.
It turns out that Colombia has the sixth best health system on the continent –above Brazil and the United States–, according to the study “Distinctive features of health systems in the world 2022” by the Colombian Association of Hospitals and Clinics (ACHC).
This is in addition to what was said in November by “The Economist”, which gave support to the system, qualifying it as one of the 10 most inclusive in the world. And now, in this new measurement, the results were obtained from variables such as life expectancy, maternal mortality rate, non-communicable disease rate, tuberculosis incidence, and disability-adjusted life years, among others.
With these, a scoring scale was defined in which zero is the worst and 100 the best. Thus, the rating of the Colombian health system was 81.5, which ranks it as the sixth best on the continent, below Canada (92.4), Costa Rica (90), Chile (87.6), Panama (85) and Cuba (83.7), and above Peru (78.5), the United States (77.8), Argentina (77.4), Ecuador (77.1) and Uruguay (75.2) .
Globally, the ranking, which measured 94 countries, placed Colombia in 39th place. For the director of the ACHC, Juan Carlos Giraldo Valencia, these results show that “there are some aspects in which the country has made significant progress and others in those that our system must improve to advance towards the first places”.
Other data from the study indicate that Colombia invests 7.7 points of GDP for the health sector: a characteristic that, the document indicates, is an indicator of better performance. Likewise, it has 23.3 doctors for every 10,000 inhabitants; with 14.6 nurses for every 10,000 inhabitants and 1.7 hospital beds for every 1,000 inhabitants.
What do these figures indicate?
Health systems researcher at Johns Hopkins University, Andrés Vecino, says that Colombia has many factors in terms of protection that make it stand out from other countries, such as financial protection and efficiency.
“In Colombia, people do not go bankrupt for accessing the system, since the percentage of spending is the lowest in the region. As for guardianships, 80% are filed due to opportunity for care and not due to denial of service, ”he said.
On the other hand, he explained that, according to WHO data, in Colombia there is a shortage of doctors, nurses and specialists, since “we have 24 doctors for every 10,000 inhabitants, when the minimum is 25 and other countries have 30, 40 or 50 and only 25% of doctors are specialists. In part, for this reason, sometimes there is no agenda and people blame the EPS”.
Finally, he assured that a few months following presenting its health reform, the Government will have to think regarding whether to go ahead, given that “they are trying to advance an agenda that is not supported by data and that national and international health experts have Said it’s risky.”
Will these data be another signal to make the Government think regarding its intended reform?
Undoubtedly, the country’s health system, following the implementation of Law 100, has been the punching bag of agitators who have sought to detract from its merits and, although there is much room for improvement, the debate lacks depth, especially for those who want to reform it. As Vecino said: “The rigged handling of the data has been done by people who are now in the Ministry of Health.”
