Peruvian Framework Law on Universal Health Assurance, under the spotlight

Abstract

The framework Law on universal Health Assurance was drawn having a background of a neo-liberal model, which generates exclusion and polarization, it was approved under circumstances in which great contrasts between the health systems prevail. On one hand, countries that keep isolated and private subsystems, and on the other, those who, unified under the State responsibility, guarantee everybody integral, free, quality access to the health services. In the Americas and Caribbean, there are countries whose citizens don’t have rights and possibilities, which unmasks the deep inequities that keep excluded the most who are poor and extremely poor. Among these, Peru shows health indicators that still have alarming numbers, much below those of other places in the world. In the last three decades, there were frustrated rehearsals of changes, such as the functional integration between the Ministry of Health and the Peruvian Institute of Social Security, or the Coordinated and Decentralized National System. Nowadays, the framework Law on universal Health Assurance is being formulated, keeping the actual subsystems without any change and with their own autonomies, trying out pilots, establishing partial plans, implementing it in a progressive fashion, giving priority to privatization and weakening the rector function of the Ministry of Health, creating an omnipotent superintendence, which will continue allowing the social exclusion of more than 9 million of Peruvians. There is, in conclusion, the need to raise the unification of the subsystems, in order to construct a unique System of Health, capable of giving a complete, integral, quality and cost-free health to the 100% citizens.