2024-04-05 11:56:05
President Gustavo Petro expressed his first reaction to the decision of the Seventh Commission of the Senate to archive the health system reform project, ensuring that the congressmen who voted against it are indicating that the EPS will face bankruptcy.
In a speech during the Great National Coffee Assembly, held at the headquarters of the Government of Cundinamarca, Petro highlighted that the rejection of the project by some congressmenwhose political campaigns were financed by EPS, reflects its preference for maintaining the current model in which EPS function as insurers, despite having exhausted technical reserve funds without providing the expected results.
«If they vote for them to become insurance companies or sink the project, the EPS will go bankrupt“said the president, underlining the message that according to him the legislators sent by shelving the project: “the EPS are breaking.”
Petro recalled the process of the health reform project, which sought to transform the role of the EPS from insurers to managers, arguing that this transition was necessary to save these entities that, according to him, have misappropriated public funds and are in a precarious financial situation.
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The Minister of Health, Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo, supported the words of President Petro, highlighting the importance of defining whether health in Colombia will be treated as a lucrative business for a few or as a fundamental right for all citizens.
President Petro pointed out that the message of the congressmen when shelving the project is to “kill, remove, destroy the time of a peaceful transition to save some private entities, which could continue to accompany us in a new health model, where the patient and not the businessman.
“We were hoping that a reform could truly be carried out, but here we have to insist, because there are still many points that are priorities, and it is the definition that the country has to have: either they want health so that it continues to be a business and they get rich “A few, or they want to have health so that it is a fundamental right and each and every Colombian can have health,” Minister Jaramillo pointed out.
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