ISSSTE diseases
The director Pedro Zenteno has stated that the lack of investment in previous governments and the abandonment of the medical infrastructure led the institute to age and present “chronic-degenerative” problems.
Until December 2021, the ISSSTE had 1,121 medical units at all levels of care at the national level, with an average age of 30 years. Of that number, only half, 588 hospitals and clinics, are owned by the institute. The rest operate under Public-Private Partnership schemes, are rented, are in regularization or subrogated, according to data from the ISSSTE Financial and Actuarial Report 2022.
In addition, it faces the challenge of serving a mostly elderly population with high-cost chronic diseases.
At the institute, 32% of its 13.7 million beneficiaries are over 60 years old and, in 2021, care for cancer, cardiovascular diseases, chronic kidney failure, diabetes and arterial hypertension cost the ISSSTE 25,173 million pesos.
The problem is that in 2050 the number of people with these diseases is expected to increase and, with it, the cost of medical care. Added to this scenario is the fact that the institute’s own income, from fees and other payments, is not enough to cover its expenses.
ISSSTE revenues, without considering money transfers from the federal government, were 107.484 million pesos in 2021, while total costs were 116.294 million pesos.
“Which generated a negative operating result of 8,810 million pesos,” states the financial report. That year the federal government transferred 14,322 million pesos to the ISSSTE.
Academic Gustavo Leal explained that the big problem is that, as of the 2007 reform of the ISSSTE Law, the institute became a “health services market.”
“What they did was deliberately decapitalize the second largest social security institution. What this strategy did was drain the resources that the institute received, ”he assured.
Since 1994, he added, ISSSTE studies have already concluded that the services should be strengthened because there was obsolescence in the equipment, antiquity in the hospitals and the aging of the health professionals.
