2024-01-28 22:38:30
04:45 PM
It is increasingly common to see the Minister of Health, Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo, involved in controversies. Clashes with journalists, statements about the use of ICUs in the covid pandemic, fights with businessmen, accusations against EPS directors and even clashes with his fellow ministers. All in the middle of a 48-year career in politics, which began when he was elected councilor of the former Armero (Tolima) and ends with this position in high government, where the health of more than 50 million Colombians is in suspense.
Jaramillo followed the path of a political family to the core and under the awnings of the Liberal Party. His father, Alfonso Jaramillo Salazar, was governor of Tolima, appointed by the conservative president Guillermo León Valencia, between 1962 and 1964; Colombian ambassador to Norway, between 1965 and 1967; as well as Minister of Health during the government of the liberal Julio César Turbay Ayala (1978-1982).
You may be interested: The Minister of Finance made the Minister of Health look bad with the tax proposal.
His mother, Hilda Martínez, was a congressman and one of his four brothers, Mauricio Jaramillo Martínez, was a councilor of Bogotá (1992-1994), a senator for 16 years (1994-2010) and tried to be governor of Tolima in the 2023 regional elections. but the National Electoral Council revoked his candidacy due to the family connection with the current minister.
Confrontation as a seal
The long-standing journalist from Tolima Arnulfo Sánchez López, director of the regional station Ecos del Combeima, was the first to notice the character of Guillermo Jaramillo when he was governor of Tolima (2001-2004). “The governor breaks down very easily”said Sánchez in 2003 after the president told him that he was critical of his administration only because “he couldn’t get 10 or 12 million pesos for advertising.”
Two years earlier, in interview with Semana Magazine Three months after beginning his term as governor, he referred to the Government of Andrés Pastrana as “a viceroyalty” that “is alive” and “is carried out from Bogotá”, to which he was not going to “beg” because “I threw away my hands a long time ago. kneepads”. In that talk he also said that in his years as a student in Europe (his resume says that he specialized in cardiovascular surgery and pediatric cardiac surgery in Sweden and Austria) he developed the social conscience that led him to want “that socialism for my country ( …) with education and the same opportunities for all.”
And as if he doesn’t say them he hears them said, being mayor of Ibagué (2016-2019) he was in the background in the camera that captured the statements of the deceased president of the Deportes Tolima club, Gabriel Camargo, when he stated about women’s soccer that ” “Women are more ‘take a drink’ than men” and that “it is a breeding ground for tremendous lesbianism.”
Jaramillo was next to Camargo and at those words he managed to laugh guiltily while he opened his eyes and mouth, covered the lower part of his face and waved his right hand up and down in a sign of concern.
These types of off-color statements are precisely what Jaramillo has outlined in the nine months he has been minister. Above all, against anyone who criticizes the health reform and with whom he dares to defend the health entrepreneurs.
Jaramillo’s attitude is defined by the former Minister of Health, Alejandro Gaviria, as “an unprecedented and dangerous situation” for the country, since “he seems more interested in attacking the system than in building viable alternatives.”
“I have never seen a minister or an official in charge in an obsessive and systematic manner of undermining the trust of the system, of increasing uncertainty, even of suing the agents of the system,” he added.
Ana María Vesga, the executive president of the Colombian Association of Comprehensive Medicine Companies (Acemi)—which brings together ten EPS of the contributory regime that the minister has called “liars”—agrees with this reading, arguing that “the conversation With him it is very difficult and so without dialogue it is very difficult to clarify concerns and advance real solutions.”
Latest history: Ibagué
If there is a clear priority for Guillermo Jaramillo, it is health reform: a bill that Gustavo Petro’s Government filed a year ago to give a 180-degree turn to the system and nationalize it.
This goal, however, has put the Ministry of Health in a scenario of push and pull, especially with the EPS, which it sees as enemies and not as allies to advance health goals. In this scenario, more than a million pediatric vaccines against Covid-19 expired and the immunization against monkeypox failed.
But, it is not the first time that Jaramillo has the health of citizens in his hands. His most recent predecessor was the Mayor of Ibagué, whose term began in 2016 and ended in 2019. In that four-year term, the health management report points out that the mortality rate of communicable diseases went from 39.56 deaths per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2015 to 42.72 in 2017; that of diseases of the circulatory system went from 200.17 in 2015 to 178.52 in 2017; that of diseases originating in the perinatal period went from 6.14 in 2015 to 6.38 in 2017; while the other diseases went from 141.28 in 2015 to 149.27 in 2017.
On the other hand, the homicide death rate went from 20.41 per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2015 to 14.93 in 2018; Likewise, the percentage of live births that registered low birth weight increased from 6.43% in 2015 to 7.29% in 2018. And the mortality rate from tuberculosis increased from 3.07 deaths per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2015. to 3.34 deaths in 2018.
Regarding vaccination coverage, vaccination against tuberculosis went from 100% in 2015 to 97% in 2018; against polio, it evolved from 90% coverage to 92%; against rotavirus remained at 93% in those years, as well as pneumococcus, which remained at 95%; against tripleviral (measles, mumps and rubella) rose from 96% to 98%; against yellow fever started at 92% in 2015 and ended at 86% in 2018.
Finally, the mortality rate in children under five years of age was 142.25 per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2015 and 144.32 in 2018; while mortality due to malnutrition in children from 0 to 5 years old was 1.90 per 100 thousand children in 2015, from 7.61 in 2016, then dropped to 0 in 2017 and remained that way for 2018.
A minister against the system?
At 73 years old and counting, Minister Guillermo Jaramillo makes his colleagues in the Government Cabinet laugh. His Treasury counterpart, Ricardo Bonilla, in fact, made him look bad this week over an idea he launched when he said that businessmen insist that “we must give more to the EPS, so then let’s carry out the tax reform and put businessmen to pay the money they stopped paying.”
After the hornet’s nest was in an uproar, Bonilla said before the microphones of Noticias RCN and Red Más Noticias: “Let’s let him ramble,” while sketching a sly smile on his face.
The epidemiologist of the Center for Medicines, Information and Power, Claudia Vaca, believes that these positions of the minister correspond to “a pressure mechanism in which the Government falls to put to the limit the discussion that in a few months will be resumed with the reform to the health”.
However, he warns that “in the case of the Ministry of Health, it cannot only respond to this debate, but it also has to manage day to day, deliver results and stop pushing everything to the limit at the beginning of the year.”
However, this strategy is costly for the minister and the entire health sector of the Government, since with the sole objective of making the health reform that President Petro wants a reality, the technical capabilities of the entities in the sector are watered down. An example is the delay in the audits for SOAT collections that the director of the Administrator of the Resources of the General Social Security System in Health (Adres), Félix Martínez, recognized; or that 1,121,040 doses of pediatric Covid vaccines expired and the ministry blamed the Health Secretariats “for not applying due diligence.”
Meanwhile, for the EPS unions, the panorama continues to be one of uncertainty and distrust among the actors in the health system. In that sense, Ana María Vesga explains that for Guillermo Jaramillo insurance companies are not important and that many of the functions they have today can be dispensed with. “But anyone who knows what they do will understand that the functions they would be left with would only be operational, that they would add little or nothing value to the system,” she said.
The concrete thing is that in nine months Minister Jaramillo has been more in the news for his statements, blunders (such as when he said that the increase in ICU beds in the pandemic was a business or that the vaccines against covid were “the most largest that has ever been made in the history of humanity”) and for a recent lawsuit that the Minsalud filed against 21 EPS for “violating the right to health”, rather than for its management.
Some experts dare to say that he is an unsustainable official for the Government, despite the fact that he has the complete confidence of President Petro.
Will the Head of State keep him waiting for him to crown the health reform and continue the confrontation that ends up affecting patients or will there be a truce to take a closer look at the financing crisis that the health system has? It will dawn and we will see.
Jaramillo’s other positions in politics
Guillermo Jaramillo’s first position in his public career was as councilor of Armero (Tolima) in 1976; Later he was a representative of Tolima in 1978 and a representative to the Chamber for that department in 1982. Between 2001 and 2004 he was governor of Tolima and between September 2009 and July 2010 he held a seat in the Senate. He was Secretary of Health (2012-2013) and Government (2013-2014) of Bogotá and Mayor of Ibagué (2016-2019).
In the beginning, he had rivalry and closeness with the liberal leader Alberto Santofimio, convicted of instigating the murder of Luis Carlos Galán. He was active in the Samperista wing of the Liberal Party.
He left the Ibagué mayor’s office immersed in a criminal process for the crime of contracting without compliance with legal requirements for the Christmas lighting tender in 2016. A judge acquitted him in April 2023.
To read more news about politics, peace, health, justice and current events, visit the Colombia section of EL COLOMBIANO.
1706488726
#councilor #minister #health #sector #check