Health reform: kill or cure?
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Loading... - Freja Jensen
- 28 Mar 2023
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After several tense months – and some twitter-baiting from the president himself – the Petro government has finally presented plans to reform Colombia’s health system. Congress will now debate radical proposals which could up-end decades of private-public partnership.
People are rightly nervous, even within Petro’s own cabinet. Can his plans revive the ailing body of health services? Or will medical meddling push the patient into rigor mortis?
Nothing is certain, but here’s what we know so far.
An end to the EPSs?
No-one loves their EPS, but we might miss them if Petro’s plan goes ahead.
Empresa Promotora de Salud are insurers that link patients to a network of health providers. They are also intermediaries for disbursement of government health funds, frequently caught in corruption scandals, or going broke overnight leaving their thousands of patients in limbo.
A central plank of Petro’s plan is to scrap the EPSs in their current form and return most of their functions to state entities. The private EPSs, “suck money out of the health system” he tweeted recently, going to the core of his argument that “health should not be a business.”
But in Colombia health has long been delivered through a for-profit health partnership between EPSs and public institutions that was launched in 1993 and lauded soon after as the “most fair in the world” by the World Health Organisation. Read More…
