12:01 AM
The agreement to carry out the health reform of the National Government is staggering. Although two weeks ago the Conservative and La U parties agreed on 20 points with the Executive to support it, this Wednesday the former president and sole leader of the Liberal Party, César Gaviria, revived his criticism of the project, both in substance and in the process, for what that left the controversial initiative without significant support. He left her in intensive care.
Not yet having the support of the former president means for the Executive to have once morest the father of the current health system and who has at his command a political capital of 33 representatives and 13 senators in Congress, key pieces not only for the reform of the health, but for all that will be presented by President Gustavo Petro.
The project is so lost that, five weeks following it was filed in Congress, there has still been no presentation in the Seventh Commission of the Chamber, in charge of studying it.
“Convincing the Government to let us process the part in which we agree and to wait and work, for a few months, on the part in which we are not, is not going to be easy. That is why we are looking at what we do because the system does need a little bit of certainty,” said the former president at an event at the Universidad del Rosario.
Meanwhile, inside the red awnings the atmosphere is one of suspicion in the face of government articles, as well as the agreements reached by Petro and the directors of the Conservative and La U parties.
A source close to the Liberals and Gaviria told EL COLOMBIANO that there is an environment to find agreements, but that in a large part of the reform there is not yet and that, for this reason, the technical commissions of that group and the ministries of Health and Treasury continue to meet. However, he warned that if it does not advance, the Liberal will file its own project as statutory law.
In fact, the nature of the project is another of the points of disagreement because the ex-president has warned the Government that if they process the reform as an ordinary law, the Constitutional Court might knock it down, if it is approved in Congress.
Likewise, Gaviria urgently asked the Executive so that in this legislature the part of the reform with agreements is approved and that the next part is debated with the most objections.
How does this impact the reform?
For the public health expert and former Bogotá Health Secretary, Luis Gonzalo Morales, this position of the Liberals distances that party from “an approach that seems to me to have things that are worse than the original government text.”
In this sense, Morales explained that, with this counterproposal, the insurers – which would come to be called health and life management companies – “will not be allowed to carry out audits, which is serious because the EPS would have to withdraw from their assets in in the event that the money for spending on health is not enough. How are they going to control the cost and what the hospitals bill?”
Concern to which the former Minister of Health, Fernando Ruiz, has added, who expresses that in this scenario the Government may run out of money, before which “the administrator washes his hands and the Colombians wait for them to give us the services of health or to pay a private insurance so that they take care of our needs”.
On the other hand, he mentioned that the political agreements that the government of Gustavo Petro reached with the conservatives and La U might be “a strategy to show that they might convince the president regarding something, but when they process it in Congress they change it once more. The moment the law is written is where everything will really come to fruition”.
Uribe’s popular consultation
Meanwhile, the former president and head of the Democratic Center, Álvaro Uribe, presented this Wednesday the draft of a possible popular consultation with which he seeks to know the opinion of Colombians regarding the health reform (in addition to the pension and labor) .
The draft consists of three points preceded by the heading “do you agree or disagree with the following questions?”. As for this reform, the consultation asks for “maintaining and improving the current health system with only four reforms in the next ten years” and also asks for emunerations of human talent, preventive medicine, attention to the rural population and the entity that resources should be directed to hospitals and clinics.
Faced with this proposal, the constitutional lawyer, Jaime Castro, pointed out that it would not be “pertinent because we are in the pre-electoral period for the October regional elections, which would greatly politicize the discussion of a reform that must be technical.” And he added that “if they did, parliamentarians are not obliged to follow the result.”
For now, although the political panorama shows that the Government can do without the votes of the Liberal Party to approve the health reform, the truth is that the objections of César Gaviria can undermine the technical confidence in the project. As the former president said: “the minister is not scared of being told that the system can collapse if we take a lot of time.”
