disastrous health policies

So it seems that this government is trying so hard to mismanage it, as if it were doing it on purpose, to hurt everyone it can. Its general policies are nothing but plans that have been reasoned, supported, agreed upon and formulated. Current government policies are more often than not just events, deliberate illusions belonging to the last century.

One of the many issues on which the government has erred significantly is public policies relating to the health sector. The chaos that the Covid pandemic has caused, and continues to cause, in our country is the clearest and most tragic example of this. But this lack of minimal government planning has had other consequences, from the lack of medicines for Mexicans suffering from cancer, to the inadequate coverage of the health system, particularly in rural areas.

History, which at some point will be responsible for judging what happens, will indicate that no matter who the president was and what his party was, the biggest mistakes made in health policy began on January 1, 2020. On that day the so-called Institute of Health was created from For luxury, known since then as Insabi. This was the time when the government dismantled part of the health system it had inherited from previous governments to create a better health institution, presumably. So good, as Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador confirmed at the time, that he would equal Denmark at the latest at the end of the same year.

Needless to add, creating that body made everything worse. What was born early last year was a deformity, without feet or head, that even public health officials themselves couldn’t manage, even today.

Previously, millions of Mexicans who did not have coverage in public health organizations (such as IMSS or ISSSTE) could register with Seguro Popular to, through state government health systems, aspire to some medical care. In 2000, more than 55 million Mexicans were unaffiliated with any social security institution. In 2018, fifteen years after Seguro Popular was introduced, the number has dropped to 22 million people without access to public health services.

In this system, public resources were allocated in a uniform manner, as the law stipulated that a share of medical care must be given to the individual. Today everything is subject to budget availability. In the absence of an appropriation formula, funding has become discretionary and even the states themselves lack rules to regulate their contributions.

Today Mexicans have not even heard of Insabi. Before registering for Seguro Popular and badly enough, they received an affiliation policy, in which they enjoyed certain rights. At that time, there was also the number of the medical director who was responsible for directing insurance beneficiaries at the corresponding hospital. now nothing. nothing at all. According to Coneval’s poverty figures, from 2018 to 2020, the number of Mexicans without health services increased from 20.1 to 35.7 million. Of this magnitude is a disaster.

Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey