This is the popular expression of something that sweeps from below, the sweet potato is on the ground and we use the term a lot when a hurricane is so powerful that it leaves the ground bare.
A few days ago, I was watching, as always, the programs of my good friend Nuria Piera. She dealt with the issue of social security and the attitude assumed by the Dominican Medical College to suspend care at this time to several of the health risk managers. (ARS)
Whoever understood, as it was at the beginning, that the claims would be against a particular ARS was wrong, the end of the purpose of the leader of the Medical College, Senén Caba and his board, is the destruction of the system in its entirety.
No wonder a good friend of mine told me that Dr. Waldo Suero would be missed. We must recognize in him a great striker in favor of the interests of doctors, but a person who understands that, with its defects, what we have today is better than what we had, it was called social security and it was neither social nor safe .
It was a corrupt system from which many benefited, supervising works that did not exist, doing business with businessmen and trade unionists, doctors, making the caveat that they were not all, I still keep the list of the many consultations he gave at the Robert Reid Hospital Dr. Suero, which he so kindly sent me.
I remember Dr. Suero accusing me of wanting to benefit from having an ARS or an AFP. I was one of the great promoters since the Conep presidency of the system we have today, a copy of the Chilean model.
Today, far from having companies in the social security system, I am a non-profit health provider, oriented to the population that needs it most. In my relationship with the ARS, companies like any other, we discuss prices, glosses and without saying that these are perfect because nobody is, they have played an important role in our system, which has suffered from not having primary care, which would have more economical fact: the fault has been of the CMD that has been strongly opposed.
Arismendi Díaz Santana led the team that worked and managed to promulgate Law 87-01. He makes a very interesting comparison between the ARS managed by Dr. Caba, who spends more than he gives on services, and Senasa.
Here I copy some of the statements of the economist Díaz Santana: “How to condemn the profit motive, if the ARS of the CMD keeps 37 pesos of every 100 that it receives? Who benefits members more, an ARS that pays so little and gets so much, or other ARS that pays so much and gets so little?” The case of Senasa, which for every 100 pesos it charges, returns 90 pesos in services.
You also have to be careful with this. Today Senasa is a great Health Risk Manager, I am a witness, but we do not run the risk that today, as in the recent past, it is managed by efficient and neat managers, in the future they have a monopoly or even worse they will fall In the hands of the CMD, we find that it not only spends 20 million on promoters that we do not understand, but that of every 100 pesos that we pay, 1 peso goes to medical care and 99 pesos to expenses.
With the recent increase in the approved capita, doctors will receive 2,667 million more annually. This is not going to improve patient care, which has not been in the concern of Senén Caba, nor I think the doctors, because their aim is against the system and the doctors themselves will end up being harmed. To be clear, I am a believer that doctors and health personnel need to be paid better.
I know many doctors that I admire, I see when a patient needs expensive surgery without insurance or without a co-payment, how they share the difference with the institution, reducing their fees. I can never allow them to be put in the same bag, it would be very unfair.
We already have enough with the ADP, to now allow the CMD, which has shown that it does not know how to manage its own ARS, to want to take over the system.
In Nuria’s program, the president of the CMD said, “we started with one in Santo Domingo, we already have the three big paralyzed, but already another in the east and north of the country.” Your plan is clear, doctor, health is of little importance to you, you want to reintroduce an inefficient system, incapable of providing health solutions, more expensive than it currently is and I am not saying corrupt, because you would have to wait for it to arrive.
I assure you that it will not be like that, that the good sense in the CMD, where many I know have expressed their displeasure at seeing how patients are postponing urgent care due to lack of insurance. Maintaining health is not only attending to emergencies, health is preventive.
Doctor, I am sure that remembering that Hippocratic oath that you took years ago will help the ARS understand your claims, as well as listen to their positions, all in a climate of harmony to benefit the patients.
The entrance The batatero cyclone was first published on newspaper the caribbean.
