Alfredo González Agencia Reforma
MONTERREY, NL.- With price increases of up to 15 percent per year on average for medical services and medicines, 6 points above the 8.7 percent at which the general index grows, private hospitals are struggling to maintain their presence in the market , affirmed Horacio Garza Ghio, general director of the Christus Muguerza Health System.
“Inflation is definitely having an impact on us,” Garza Ghio said in an interview.
«To get an idea, normally you have to add between 4 and 6 percentage points above general inflation to inflation in the health sector. If general inflation, for example, were 5 percent, medical grade inflation would be between 8 or 10 percent.”
He pointed out that galloping inflation gives private hospitals a major challenge to be able to contain to a greater extent the transfer of the increase in costs to the users of their services.
“The service and attention may become less and less accessible and so much investment in technology, so much innovation in digital issues, will be useless if we really cannot contain the rise in costs.
«The increases hit us in three ways: one, direct inflation, which is already above 8 percent, almost 9 percent; second, inflation in the United States, above 7 percent, when they normally have 0.4 percent, and third, the shortage of components, which makes them more expensive by up to 30 percent.
He indicated that in the United States they have begun to control inflation, but the index grows at historical levels, which hits private medicine that struggles to avoid passing on the increases to its users.
“Our industry is closely linked to the production of supplies, equipment and even medicines abroad,” he explained.
“So they already come to us with a higher price and we are also dollarized, and there are some teams that quote them for us in euros, but our currency is not as strong once morest these two and that also impacts us.”
He highlighted the problem caused by the lack of components, as other industries suffer.
“Here the issue is that the equipment is taking longer to reach us and is becoming more expensive because there is greater demand and less supply, because simply the law of supply and demand makes the prices of these equipment continue to rise.”
Garza Ghio clarified that both for the medical industry and for hospital services there was an impact of higher salary costs derived from the labor reform, even for the external services they contract, which was added to the increases in supplies and equipment.
He acknowledged that as happens in public medicine, private hospitals have suffered, albeit occasionally, a shortage of drugs, especially oncology.
“But we have agreements directly with the large distributors or with the drug producing houses and we have been able to do better, in reality I can say that we have not suffered from the shortage in a considerable way, although there have been peaks and valleys, but they are not as frequent” .
Among the equipment that has become more expensive, he referred to those used to treat serious diseases such as cancer, with increases of up to 30 percent, when their cost reaches up to 3 million dollars.
