2024-01-03 18:30:05
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has been in government for five years and austerity has been one of his official narratives, under the mandate of doing more with fewer resources. This has been reflected in a significant increase in spending on social protection but with a fairly modest increase in the health area.
Data offered by the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit showed that, from January to July 2019 (first year of López Obrador’s government), spending on social protection was 742,846 million pesos, while for the same period of This year, just over 1 billion pesos have been disbursed to this area, which contains pensions and some social programs.
Welfare Pensions are integrated into social protection
In this way, spending on social protection, which includes the Welfare Pensions, one of the government’s flagship programs, has increased by 35.2 percent so far in the current administration.
The case of health is different from that of social protection. Even with the promise of a universal health system (and with the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 and ended this year, resources in this area barely grew.
Institutional mechanisms must be strengthened to guarantee the health budget
While in the year before the pandemic (2019), in the first seven months 367 thousand 551 million pesos were spent; This year, during the same period, 373 thousand 166 million pesos were allocated; That is, just 1.5% compared to the beginning of the six-year term.
The consequences of not having greater spending on health have a direct impact on household spending, given that they must disburse resources to attend in private places and, even, even with their affiliation to a public health institution, many times They end up being cared for in a private institution. That is why institutional mechanisms must be strengthened to guarantee the efficiency of the health budget.
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