Insabi’s mistakes
(Photo: Mexican government)
Insabi presented irregularities in its budgets a little over a year after it disappeared, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador accepted that this decentralized organization did not work.
“In the case of health, what we had planned did not work there (…) And Insabi worked, but it was not what we were originally thinking (…) So, there we had an administrative mishap; it was corrected and now we are moving forward,” said the president on July 10, 2024 when speaking about said organization that was created to replace Seguro Popular.
Former Health Secretary in Felipe Calderón’s government, Salomón Chertorivski, commented that Insabi was born “to fail,” because he said that this Institute was not created from an evaluation of Seguro Popular, which emerged in 2004.
“It never started with a serious evaluation of what worked in Seguro Popular, the things that needed to be improved in Seguro Popular and what didn’t work. When in this country we had a lot of information for that decision making. Seguro Popular is the Mexican State policy with the most evaluation and the most research in history,” he said in an interview with Political Expansion.
He commented that the government of Andrés Manuel decided to dissolve Seguro Popular under the argument of saying that it was useless and was not “popular,” so they created Insabi, but it had “wrong” principles, such as not having a registry of beneficiaries, nor did they have a catalog of the illnesses that they were going to cover, nor were there rules for collaborative work with the states.
IMSS-Bienestar is created
Following these errors, the federal government eliminated INSABI and created the Health Service of the Mexican Social Security Institute for Welfare (IMSS-Bienestar) to take charge of the functions of the Institute, which were to provide health services to people who are not beneficiaries of any public health institution.
In August 2022, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced the creation of IMSS-Bienestar and in May 2023 the federal government published a decree to eliminate Insabi. It was at that time that the functions of the Institute were transferred to IMSS.
Following this decision, IMSS-Bienestar began to serve people who are not affiliated with IMSS or ISSSTE, so a single decentralized organization began to provide health services throughout the country, but in conjunction with the states.
This decree established that the IMSS-Bienestar health services will collaborate with the Ministry of Health in regards to the free provision of health services, medicines and other associated supplies required by people without social security.
Meanwhile, from the Chamber of Deputies, in May 2023, the opposition requested that the current head of Insabi, Juan Ferrer Aguilar, be summoned to appear to explain the liquidation of the institution under his charge, the inconsistencies that have been documented in the management of public resources and the lack of access to health services. However, this proposal did not prosper.
“Now that the institution is disappearing, the lack of transparency and the misuse of public resources that it has carried out since its creation cannot go unpunished,” said PAN legislator Éctor Ramírez Barba at the time.
