2023-08-02 13:46:17
A “medicine cartel” dominated practically 80 percent of the market for the purchase of drugs by the State in the country, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said yesterday.
In his morning conference, the Chief Executive warned that in the drug sector “there is a lot of charlatanry and a lot of profit” and that his government has fought it.
He affirmed that the medicines cartel is “one of the most lucrative cartels we have faced”, which stole some 200 billion pesos a year “including medicines, equipment, and all this was managed by a group of influence peddlers and corrupt politicians. ”.
In response to a question, the president stated that, in the 2012-2018 period, ten suppliers handled practically 80 percent of the sale of medicines, out of a total of more than 303 billion pesos that the Mexican State allocated to that item. .
“I always talk about organized crime and white collar crime. And if you say to me: ‘Which is the worst?’, he would say: they are the same. Because white-collar crime, among other evils, does not even lose its respectability, they pose as businessmen, as businessmen and for profit they cause harm to society, ”he emphasized.
Things are different today, said the president and highlighted the work of the officials of the Ministry of Health, particularly its head, Jorge Alcocer, whom he recalled is a National Science Awardee, one of the most important researchers in the country and of the world in his matter, “but above all an honest man, he has nothing to do with these doctors who have become immensely rich overnight”.
Psychiatric drugs, 94 percent: Alcocer
The President stressed that the power groups that maintained the monopoly on the purchase of medicines, including some news media, are angry. He added that this explains attacks on his government in which, he considered, children with cancer and people with psychiatric illnesses are used in a political way.
After López Obrador acknowledged the lack of psychiatric medications, Alcocer explained that 94 percent of the demand is available from this segment, and the rest will be resolved by the second half of August.
The president pointed out that the protests among users are respectable, but he assured that many are linked to the group that monopolized the sale of medicines.
For his part, the director of the Mexican Institute of Social Security, Zoé Robledo, indicated that the IMSS-Welfare already operates in 14 of the 22 entities that have agreed to transfer their hospitals to the Federation.
Until now, Robledo reported, 6,307 health centers, 294 hospitals and 21 specialty units have been transferred to the federal agency, for which 7,947 medical specialists have been hired and there is a total investment of 8,484 million pesos to acquire 91 thousand teams.
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