In the last debate attended by the candidate of the Historical Pact, organized by EL TIEMPO and Semana, Petro managed to enlighten us about two of his flagship programs: the expropriation of pension savings from 18 million Colombian workers and the dismantling of the health model in force since the 1990s, which has allowed Colombia to be one of the few countries in the world in which access to health services is practically universal.
Of the first, nor what to speak; Enough lightning and sparks rained down on him. And the reform proposed for the health sector is not an idea, but an “occurrence”, as Moisés Wasserman recently stated in his column for EL TIEMPO.
The Human Colombia candidate proposes a model of preventive care, through primary care centers, for every 20,000 inhabitants, where citizens register to be attended by neighborhood doctors, without the need for EPS intermediation. It is not a new idea. Chávez implanted it in Venezuela in 2003 and Petro copied it in Bogotá, during his administration, from 2012 to 2015. In both cases the results were unfortunate. In the neighboring country, the chaos has been increasing, because the outpatient modules are today closed by more than 80%. And in Bogotá it gave rise to a costly and inefficient system, which was worth 1,000 million pesos per day to the city, which did not improve the quality of the service and was delivered with an emergency congestion rate of over 250%, with the aggravating circumstance that at that time access to a medical appointment depended on queuing from dawn or paying for a turn of attention.
According to the organization Transparency Venezuela, with the Barrio Adentro Mission, the basic indicators of maternal and child mortality, access to medical services and the appearance of endemic diseases that have been eradicated in that country have been significantly degraded. What was indeed a complete success for the Chavista revolution was that, thanks to this fraud, it was possible for more than 30,000 Cuban doctors to enter Venezuela, who contributed to the ideologization of the citizenry and the support of the regime.
Similar to what happened in Venezuela, where -according to analysts- health money went down the paths of corruption and waste, Mayor Gustavo Petro’s Healthy Territories program gave rise to a financial debacle of the system capital, in which the District’s EPS went bankrupt and, due to its financial crisis, the debt with public and private hospitals increased, which eroded the capital’s health system.
Colombians need to know that not only their pensions are threatened, but also their health system, which –since the 1990s– has been a silent revolution
And, as if that were not enough, due to the lack of transparency in the contracting system in the health sector, she was left in intensive care. More than 95% of the contracts for hospitals and health centers were made by hand, during Bogotá Humana, for a value of 22 billion pesos, which made it easier for the contracting to be concentrated in a few contractors. One of them, Drogas Boyacá, was the beneficiary –according to reports from the control agencies– of a supply contract every 36 hours.
These antecedents call into question the network of medical services suggested by the Historical Pact, coupled with its recognized management inability to adapt and expand the hospital network, all of this now without the presence of the EPS, just when the plan is being concluded. financial restructuring of these institutions, which will allow them to catch up with their debts to the country’s hospitals and clinics.
Colombians need to know that not only are their pensions threatened, but also their health system, which – since the 1990s – has been a silent revolution. Because access to its services is not a privilege in our country, nor does it depend on commercial insurance. Health, even if it has great challenges ahead in terms of quality of service, is a public good available to all that can be lost, as has already happened in Venezuela.
Pop. …All of Colombia is very grateful to France.
NESTOR HUMBERTO MARTINEZ NEIRA
(Read all columns of Nestor Humberto Martinez in EL TIEMPO here).