The calculation – of 24 million dollars – includes only the Cuban doctors who arrived in Mexico in those two years, because until September 2024 the country had already received a total of 3,101, according to data presented by Zoé Robledo, general director of the IMSS. , in the last health report of López Obrador’s six-year term.
Through a request for information, the IMSS responded that between November 10, 2022 and February 7, 2024, it had paid 437.4 million pesos for the services of Cuban doctors.
The salary of these doctors has not been accurately disclosed, since Mexico covers their monthly salary, in addition to lodging and transportation expenses.
However, the PAN has denounced that each specialist on the island costs the government more than 100 thousand pesos a month, of which around a quarter is salary – which is deposited in a Cuban government company – and the rest to transport, feed and house each doctor.
In contrast, the salary of general practitioners and specialists in Mexico as of the second quarter of 2024 was 8,500 pesos per month on average, according to official figures.
“Mexico has hired hundreds of Cuban doctors in order to address a relative deficit of doctors in rural communities. This has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it does not solve the problem of access to health,” warned Diego Ramonfaur, a doctor at the Department of Internal Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, United States, and co-author of the article.
Doctor shortage
In 2022, the Ministry of Health estimated that Mexico needed 154 thousand specialists and 34 thousand general practitioners to cover its deficit only in hospitals for the population without social security. Since then it has launched a series of campaigns to hire more health personnel.
The problem is that the gap in doctors persists due to distribution and disposition. Every year around 17,500 new general practitioners graduate and 12,500 complete a specialty. But the majority work in cities and some reject places in hospitals in rural areas, where high rates of violence, insecurity or poverty are often recorded, but the needs for medical care are also greater.
Faced with these challenges, the López Obrador administration chose to bring doctors from Cuba to serve in rural areas. The agreement includes the salary of the specialists, as well as travel and lodging costs, which increases the amount of investment in these professionals.
In a call launched in October 2022, a gross monthly salary of 53,569 pesos to hire foreign specialists, plus additional benefits, such as a Christmas bonus, vacation bonus, food support, savings fund and support for lodging.
On the other hand, IMSS Bienestar medical specialists received an income of 20,434 pesos in tabular base salary and 23,230 pesos in compensation for services, according to the salary and salary tabulator.
But at the national level, regardless of the health institution, the average salary of doctors was 8,500 pesos in the second quarter of 2024, according to data from the Ministry of Economy.
The export of Cuban doctors to different countries has generated criticism, say specialists, because a greater proportion of their income is kept by the Cuban government, which collects 11,000 million dollars annually for the work of 40,000 doctors in 67 countries. according to article data.
