AMLO's ambitious healthcare drive awaits key legislation

Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) will have to wait for the end of low-cost healthcare system Seguro Popular as key legislation is needed to do away with it.

After Seguro Popular’s 15 years of existence, the process to change it requires more than “changing a name,” according to Seguro Popular’s commissioner Angélica Ivonne Cisneros Luján.

Speaking to local daily El Economista, Cisneros said it involves eliminating barriers in the program that prevent health care access for all Mexicans and that limit access to coverage for all medical conditions and medicines.

While the program created under the Vicente Fox administration was developed under the market logic of the time, the new body, dubbed the national welfare health system (INSB), involve a total transformation under a “logic of rights,” she said.

When recently presenting INSB, AMLO said the current system is both unjust and inhumane since it does not guarantee the right to health care.

AMLO further stated that the public health system would be federalized, “especially as regards the care of the uninsured population, the population that does not have the right to social security.”

The federal government has reached agreements with 12 states to advance with the federalization process while lawmakers moving to revise article 77B of the current health code, said Cisneros.

Launched in 2004, Seguro Popular was the result of a structural health reform the year before that established article 77B.

“All this will change and it will be very fast because there is a will, we are already working on the reform proposal that will be sent as soon as possible to congress,” Cisneros said.

Seguro Popular has more than 53mn members and there are 10mn more waiting for their enrollment to be processed.

A major audit of the agency found spending irregularities with more than 301bn pesos (US$15.7bn) in federal funding between 2013 and 2017. The allegations spurred senators earlier this month to order an investigation at the attorney general’s office.

Seguro Popular, despite its problems, reported having handled 27mn medical consultations in the first half of 2018 and 1.4mn emergency room visits.