The Mexican Congress approved decreeing the death of what was never born: the Institute of Health for Well-being (Insabi).
It was founded on January 1, 2020 by decree of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Its creation led to the disappearance of Seguro Popular, which provided medical protection to 15 million Mexicans and provided more than 40 million outpatient consultations, almost eight million highly specialized consultations, a million and a half mammograms, and more than a million papanicolaou tests. .
If Felipe Calderón left a thousand public hospitals unfinished and Enrique Peña Nieto abandoned hundreds of warehouses with expired medicines, this administration was not far behind.
Together with the Insabi, the fatal effects of the coronavirus began in the world and the serious deficiencies of the health sector were revealed, the crisis of the medical supplies purchasing system, the shortage of medicines, the lack of beds and fans to care for the victims of the pandemic and the criminal shortage of medicines for childhood cancer.
The size of the failure is evident. Nearly three thousand children with cancer died due to lack of medicines and Mexico, according to the WHO, had the second worst performance in Covid care in Latin America, only below Brazil, with more than 333 thousand deaths related to the pandemic. A disaster.
The offer to reach medical services of the quality of Denmark in Mexico remained another broken promise. Millions of Mexicans, mainly the poorest, were left without medical attention and medicines because the 4T created an institute without having a prior diagnosis and placed inexperienced personnel in charge of it, evidencing the failure of the presidential maxim: 90 percent loyalty and 10 percent capacity.
Exactly three years, three months and 26 days after the start of Insabi’s activities, the majority of the Morena legislators in Congress voted for its extinction with avidity and lightness, without an opinion from the commissions, without discussion in the forum and just a few hours after the initiative was presented.
Today, the construction of the new health system in Mexico is underway with the leadership of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS).
With more than 17 billion pesos of debts inherited by Insabi, Zoé Robledo must demonstrate her ability to overcome financial obstacles; find spaces for negotiation with the political agenda hijacked by the presidential succession; and obtain budgetary resources from the Federation and the states, with diminished power at the end of the six-year term. A debt that is not only economic, it is moral.
