Colombia’s controversial health care providers, or EPS, are receiving almost $26 million a year for the health care of dead people who were never removed from computer systems, newspaper El Tiempo reported Friday.
According to the daily, some 89,000 deceased Colombians are still registered as clients of the health care providers.
The office of Colombia’s Comptroller General has been going through the health care providers’ databases and criticized the health sector’s “historical weakness” when it comes to information technology, reported El Tiempo.
Apart from the tens of thousands of dead people still registered as health care beneficiaries, some 190,000 Colombians are registered double, the newspaper said.
Some 460,000 children who do have the right to health insurance are not registered along with their parents, in spite of that being their legal right.
Colombia’s Congress is currently debating a health reform that seeks to curb massive ongoing corruption in the EPS. The corruption has led to the near bankruptcy of hospitals around the country as the health care providers fail to pay the hospitals.
Representatives of the health care sector have carried out small strikes to protest the reform, which they claim will not improve Colombia’s health care crisis.