Petro warns that without health reform the EPS will go bankrupt

Failure of an agreement

According to Petro, the original health reform project, presented 14 months ago, did not contemplate the EPS, “they were ending,” he said, but due to pressure from congressmen the Government accepted “a concertation” to guarantee its continuity but no longer as ” “health insurers” but as “managers”.

“The Government allows the EPS to continue, we save them”stated the president, who added that despite this change to the reform, Congress did not agree with the project and sank it today in the Seventh Committee of the Senate where a proposal to archive it was approved by nine votes to five.

Before the coffee growers, Petro stressed that “the EPS congressmen”, whom he said were financed by companies in the sector, “did not like” the text of the reform.

The president added that, by sinking the project, “the EPS went bankrupt” and that is why the intended change in the health system will have to be done “suddenly” because, he emphasized, “what we have in our hands are human lives, this is not “They are coffee beans, which is important, but more importantly, they are human lives.”

The president’s comments aroused fear that he would resort to a maneuver outside the institutional framework since the intervention in Sanitas and the Nueva EPS is interpreted by some experts as an attempt to apply by decree what could not be done with the attempted reform of the health.

“If Gustavo Petro and his ministers intend to forcefully impose a reform shelved by the Legislature, they enter fully into the field of the penal code, violating the Constitution and the American Convention on Human Rights. The abuse of power and the breaking of separation of powers are the prelude to dictatorships,” said former conservative president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002).

For his part, former Minister of Finance Mauricio Cárdenas said: “We remain in the hands of the Council of State, which must review the legality of the administrative acts with which health is being nationalized.”