Mexico arrive at world health day at a time of low incidence of COVID-19 infections but with more than 323,000 deaths from the disease and dragging the same challenges for years: achieving a true universal health and fix the lack of medication.
“The reality is that (we arrived at this day) in one of the health crisis most serious that we have faced”, explained this Thursday to Efe, Xavier Tello, surgeon and health communication consultant.
In the commemoration of the World Health Day, which is celebrated this April 7, the expert explained that the healthcare system Mexican continues to face great problems, which worsened with the arrival of the pandemic just over two years ago.
“There are three main errors: the purchasing system was dismantled, Seguro Popular disappeared, and the pandemic was handled terrible,” he pointed out.
important shortcomings
One of the promises of the current president Andres Manuel Lopez Obradorwhen he came to power in December 2018, was that of the universal access to health of all Mexicans.
However, three years after that, the reality is that with the few advances in the Health Institute for Wellness (Insabi) and the transformation of the IMSS-Wellbeingthe health system, has become even more fragmented.
“There is an absolute disorganization regarding the health system in Mexico, with these new (governmental) ideas it is not clear to us what the new service scheme is,” said Carolina Gómez, Master of Public Health.
In that sense, a analysis presented this week by the organization Citizen Action Against Poverty pointed out that the health system in Mexico is insufficient to guarantee effective access to all Mexicans.
“Mexico has a health system that is not responding to the needs of the population,” said Arantxa Colchero Aragonés, a researcher at the National Institute of Public Health, during the presentation of the report.
The document detailed that the healthcare system offers differentiated treatment between beneficiaries and people not affiliated with social security.
In addition, despite the fact that patients and their families finance the public system through their taxes, many times they also pay out of pocket for private services due to lack of care or prescriptions not filled effectively.
In addition to the fact that the services work without transparency and lack effective defense mechanisms against inflated costs and other abuses, he added.
According to data from the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (Coneval), there are around 35 million Mexicans without affiliation to health services.
roll back decades
For Tello, the decisions made by the Mexican government have resulted in “we are going back almost 70 years in our health system.”
Among the critical decisions are the disappearance of the Sure Popularwhich attended to those people who did not have any type of social security, and who today, without clear rules from the Insabi (created to assume the same function), have been left without medical care.
But in addition, the changes in the purchasing system of medicines has led to drug shortages.
The elimination of the catastrophic expense fund, whose resources were destined to care for highly expensive illnesses such as cancer, has also been criticized.
“They kidnapped the money from Seguro Popular and diverted more than 60 billion pesos and put it into current spending, we don’t know what they do with that money,” Tello lamented.
In addition to this, Gómez specified, “there is not enough investment” to guarantee free care.
“I don’t see how it can be enough to address the many promises the president made and the health access needs,” he said.
Both specialists criticized policies such as the disappearance of the National Vaccination Weekin which the complete immunization scheme was guaranteed to minors.
“We had eradicated the measles and the poliomyelitisbut now we have had reports of outbreaks of these diseases,” Gómez said.
While Tello lamented that in the last three years Mexico has been “stuck” in the basic vaccination schedules which shows “that children are not interested in this Government.”
Uncertain future
For the experts, the president will not have enough time to leave a universal health system similar to that of Denmark or Norway, as he had promised on his arrival at the Presidency.
This, they insisted, due to the pandemic by COVID-19 and because due to the burden of patients who were neglected during the health emergency, it is necessary to redesign the entire patient care model.
In addition to this, they expressed their concern about the vision of the health authorities on reducing the levels of the pandemic because, they considered, it is not over.
“We are in a period of low contagion. The pandemic is not ending,” said Tello, who recalled that Mexico has more than 5.6 million infections and exceeds 323,000 deaths from COVID-19.
While Gómez said that it is necessary to take action and think about health in a different way, as well as not to continue testing schemes that are not working and to strengthen the first level of care.
With information from EFE