The vast majority of the private intermediaries that are part of Colombia’s public healthcare system don’t comply with regulations that allow them to operate, according to the Comptroller General’s Office.
According to the watchdog, only five of the 26 intermediaries, called EPS’s, have the financial reserves to operate legally.
The EPS’s that are supposed to coordinate health treatments have accumulated a debt of $6.4 billion (COP25 trillion).
Some $2.8 billion (COP11 trillion) of this debt is owed to hospitals, said the financial watchdog in a report on the state of the public healthcare system.
Twenty-one EPS’s, equivalent to 80.7%, do not comply with the provision or investment of their technical reserves, which demonstrates a serious breach of the regulations and a risk for the system in that, by not constituting the reserves, they do not leverage their obligations to meet health care expenses.
Comptroller General’s Office
The financial check was carried out while the government of President Gustavo Petro was pushing Congress to approve a major healthcare reform without much luck.
We have been saying it for several years. The system of financial intermediaries in healthcare is collapsing. It is unsustainable. Tens of billions of pesos have gone up in smoke in commercial and even political corporations.
President Gustavo Petro
In an interview with radio station Caracol, EPS representative Mario Cruz said that the financial woes of his sector are due to “various factors, like the major pandemic of two years and the almost 370,000 people who were attended with intensive care.”
The president of EPS association Acemi, Ana Maria Vesga, denied that the debts are the result of systemic issues.
The issue is much more complex than it seems, and these findings of the Comptroller’s Office are not necessarily due to corruption, mismanagement and improper actions of the EPSs. What is certain is that it is a structural problem. The Colombian health system spends more than it receives, which is why it is always on the edge of the abyss.
Acemi president Ana Maria Vesga
