The representative of the Convite Civil Association, Luis Francisco Cabezas, indicated that insurers have restrictive practices against older adults, where “they practically do not want to cover anything”
The General Director of the Civil Association TreatLuis Francisco Cabezas, assured this Thursday that the country’s older adults receive the lowest salaries in Latin America, which places Venezuela as the worst nation to grow old.
During an interview in Radio Unionthe representative of the NGO referred to the set of quality of life indicators of the World Health Organization, dating from 2016.
“The marker is not recent,” said the activist. “Out of a sample of 79 countries, only Honduras surpassed us in Central America, but on the Latin American continent, we were listed as the worst,” he pointed out.
He also indicated that the World Bank establishes that to live above the poverty line, a minimum of 1.90 dollars a day is needed and currently, a Venezuelan older adult earns less than 0.83 cents a day.
“How does an older adult live on $25 a month? That’s less than 0.83 cents a day. Retired older adults receive less than what is recommended by the World Bank,” she emphasized.
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Access to medicines
Cabezas assured that the elderly population has difficult access to medicines because it is not possible to allocate 40% of the total pension to medicines, when they should prioritize food.
“If what they receive is 25 dollars a month, and a box of Losartan costs seven, how do they allocate practically 40% of what they give you to live, to a box of pills that only contains 28 tablets? It is not even enough for the whole month”, added the director of Convite.
In the same way, he assured that the possibility that an adult can access a private HCM policy is restricted to one percent of the entire population of older adults.
“To this we must add that the insurers themselves have very restrictive practices towards the elderly, in which they practically do not want to cover anything. There we see, on the one hand, the public health system dismantled and on the other, private health, inaccessible” she sentenced.
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