The Mayan Day
09/24/2024 | Merida, Yucatan
These days are the days of final reports from members of the presidential cabinet, and this Monday it was the turn of the Secretary of Health, Jorge Alcocer Varela, to present his latest “Pulse of Health.”
Making an assessment of the progress in this area during the six-year term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, making a comparison with his predecessors, is unfair, since none of them faced a pandemic. It should be noted that during the government of Felipe Calderón there was an outbreak of influenza AH1N1, but the impact that this disease produced in terms of deaths, economic decline and response capacity of institutions such as the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) and the Institute of Social Security and Services for State Workers (ISSSTE), are even irrelevant.
And that is precisely the information that Alcocer Varela could have presented this Monday, and instead he preferred to boast about universal care for the population without social security, which is also no small thing, but by having shown how the state health infrastructure had to be reorganized and continuing with the progress made in guaranteeing access to medical care, possibly we would have an extremely interesting summary of the deployment of resources that had to be made as a country in order to protect lives.
Jorge Alcocer will not have continuity in the cabinet of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the president-elect. It must be said that his thing was not to be in front of the cameras every week, and during the pandemic, the one who took center stage was Undersecretary Hugo López-Gatell, with the consequences that this entails.
Zoé Robledo will continue, and was also the architect of the reorganization of the IMSS during the Covid-19 pandemic. He took advantage of this last morning conference to refer to the progress made by the IMSS-Bienestar program, highlighting its public, free, universal, preventive and national planning nature.
The opposition has already made several criticisms of IMSS-Bienestar, but the strength of this program is that it is precisely a national and state strategy, which does not leave the federal entities at the mercy of the little budget they can allocate for their health infrastructure, and even less in the hands of the private sector that has made large and very juicy businesses with medical care and laboratory, office and hospitalization services.
One big difference is that the universal character of IMSS-Bienestar is the dispersion of services. While previously the clinics and hospitals were concentrated in the capitals, leaving only 80 rural hospitals and 3,622 rural medical units in 19 states, in these six years the number has increased to 660 hospitals and 11,935 health centers in 28 entities; here we emphasize that this was with a pandemic in the middle.
Let us add that the capacity to care for people without social security was, in 2019, 12.3 million people. Now it is provided to 53.2 million. The data is contradictory, because although the increase in capacity is a positive indicator, the reverse side of the coin is that there are more than 50 million Mexicans without social security. This will be the part of social justice that will be addressed by the administration headed by Claudia Sheinbaum and which begins next week.
Edited by: Fernando Sierra
