What is the decree to consolidate the IMSS-Wellbeing?

Four months before the end of his administration, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is preparing the publication of a decree with which he intends to consolidate a super IMSS-Wellbeing.

The federal government is working on a decree to transfer the human, financial and material resources of the IMSS-Wellbeing Program, created in 1979, to the ordinary IMSS and the new IMSS-Wellbeing.

With the disappearance of the program, 21,623 million pesos that were assigned to it in the 2024 Expenditure Budget will be transferred. As well as 4,075 properties, among which are 82 rural hospitals and 3,993 medical units, first and second level of care.

“The transfer of said resources will be carried out in a coordinated manner between the IMSS and the IMSS-Bienestar; said entities, through the mechanism that they determine, must agree on which program resources are necessary for their purpose and operation,” the project specifies. decree.

Thus, the head of the Executive seeks to consolidate the Decentralized Public Body (OPD) IMSS-Bienestar before the end of his mandate, to “have in Mexico the best public health system in the world”, as he has repeatedly promised.

For this reason, the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP) will have 120 calendar days, from the moment the decree comes into effect, to make the corresponding programmatic and budgetary adjustments to transfer the resources.

Taking that period into account, perhaps President López Obrador could make official the transfer of resources from the IMSS-Wellbeing Program to the OPD before the end of his term, on September 30, 2024.

However, experts point out that this modification does not represent an improvement in health services, because these units and workers will continue to serve the same beneficiaries, since there are entities and rural areas where there are no units of the Ministry of Health, and only the IMSS-Wellbeing Program. Likewise, it is necessary to increase the budget for the Health sector, infrastructure and end the shortage of medicines, more than the transfer of resources from the IMSS-Wellness Program, they stressed.

Deputy Éctor Jaime Ramírez Barba, doctor in Public Administration, explained that the transfer of resources from the Program to the OPD is consistent, “since it was not logical that there were more subsystems.”

The also secretary of the Health Commission of the Chamber of Deputies warned that “nothing is going to improve either, because that population is going to continue where it is. For example, in Tabasco there are about 600 first-level IMSS-Wellness units, there are no from the Ministry of Health, there is no OPD, it is only the IMSS-Wellness Program that is there, in the rural areas of Oaxaca, the majority is the IMSS-Wellness Program. It operates in 19 states. This program, those medical units continue to serve them, now they are going to say: ‘The IMSS-Wellness OPD is now serving them.’ The IMSS-Wellness OPD has only swallowed up the resources and personnel of the entire national health system. , a single institution, in quotes, because they continue to be institutions, each with its own logic.