Minister Corcho would have refused to meet the associations of users of EPS

After several months of rumors and uncertainties about the future of the PESthe health reform – which would be the most discussed in the history of Colombia, according to the minister Caroline Liege– will be filed before Congress of the Republic on Monday, February 13, by President Gustavo Petro and the portfolio manager who, in recent weeks, drafted the document with the Ministry of Finance and delegates from the World Health Organization (WHO).

“In the health sector, there are more than 800 organizations, 1,500 unions of all kinds within trade union, medical, nursing, bacteriological and patient associations in each region”, according to the minister, whom he would have tried to meet throughout the first 6 weeks of 2023. However, complaints from actors linked to the health sector who they were excluded from the debate of reform.

This is the case of EPS user associations. Your manager, Gloria Quicenoworried in an interview for Radio Bluein which he warned that representatives of more than 34.3 million members The 30 EPS who are currently working in the country have not been invited to join the conversation on the points that the text of the health reform will include:

“We want to tell the country that the minister refused to listen to us. We continue to expect you to listen to us, it is an obligation to listen to us. We are the associations of users of all the EPS, we know the system, its failures, its virtues and the problems of the country”.

Initially, the reform provided for the elimination of health promotion entities (PES), to set up – in its place – the chain of care that begins with the Primary Care Centers (CAP). And, in this way, eliminate their role as financial intermediaries.

However, after the final adjustments to the document, the President and the Minister of Health announced that this decision would be reversed to give EPS a place in the new health system, on the condition that they commit to becoming entities which, although they are not the institutional axis, will support to “primary care centres, which may be public or private. In other words, the EPS can, if it wants to survive today in the new system that we are proposing, start its survival with the Primary Care Centers (CAP)”, explained the Head of State, at the National Assembly of the departments, in which he presented the project to the governors.

Although the user associations hold the meeting between the president and the representatives of the EPS and the IPS, on February 9, during which it was agreed that they will not be eliminated with the reform, as said the Minister of the Interior, alphonse prada“Under no circumstances will the project eliminate the EPS, nor will it impose any condition of subsistence on them. (We will seek) that they are conditioned and able to coexist within the new system of prevention and primary care and that they have all the possibilities of having their social objects”, they also claim not to have participated, until now, to the discussion around the document and its key points, which will be debated in several sessions in the House and the Senate, in the coming days:

“We would like the Congress of the Republic to open its doors so that it listens to us, especially to associations. Not in an audience where so many people are talking, but in one with all the associations and that we can express our doubts and our fears and that the country knows what we think, since the minister refused to do so.