Loose points continue around the operation of the new IMSS-Well-being model without anyone explaining how the whole process will go through. On the one hand, there is the expressed objective that by the end of 2022 the selected entities will have transferred all their medical units to the Institute directed by Zoé Robledo.
There is talk that it will start first only with the 3 smallest states – Nayarit, Colima and Tlaxcala. The first has been Nayarit, whose Governor Miguel Ángel Navarro neither slow nor lazy over the weekend already handed over to the IMSS the operation of its 261 Health Centers and 16 hospitals plus one under construction.
On the other hand, it is not clear how the relationship of the entities with the Insabi will remain. If the IMSS will be in charge of all the medical care, what will the Institute that Juan Ferrer leads have to do? Will he be solely in charge of purchasing supplies? And will you continue to sign their respective agreements with the entities? If so, then there will be a double agreement of the entities; on the one hand with the IMSS to operate the hospitals and on the other hand with the Insabi to continue taking charge of the purchases and give them resources in kind.
Another question that remains open is whether the budget granted to IMSS Welfare is sufficient to operate the infrastructure and the workers to provide all the medical care of the non-entitled population in each incorporated entity.
Besides, it has not been clarified what will happen to third level care, because it has been stated that the new scheme is focused on first and second level, with a focus on prevention. IMSS Bienestar does not include highly specialized care.
The subject of IMSS Welfare is still vague and seems more like gibberish that they will be putting together as the march progresses over the next two years. There is also the obstacle of all those governors who are already anticipating not joining the new scheme because they do not see head or tail, and they are not only non-adherents, because there are even some governed by Morena who will not enter it. Of the states that still did not adhere to the Insabi until 2021 were: Aguascalientes, Nuevo León, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas.
The only clear thing so far is that Zoé Robledo will be taking a lot of strength with an obvious greater preserve of power in each entity with which she signs.
Meanwhile, Juan Ferrer’s Insabi is still lost on the horizon because that attempt to call a meeting last Monday in Acapulco to supposedly update the Compendium of Health Supplies, remained a pipe dream, because clearly according to the law that attribution is of the General Health Council. It is good that for the 4T the law is something unimportant and almost like a hindrance, but that is one thing and another that wants to attribute tasks as significant as the definition of supplies to be included in purchases, something that the law defines as corresponding to the collegiate body that is the CSG.
For leaving SS regulations
They tell us that the Legal Department of the Presidency will now release the new Internal Regulations of the Ministry of Health for publication, with which all those changes of affiliation for the new undersecretary led by Hugo López-Gatell will finally be finalized. This means that in fact to date none of those changes announced in 2020 have been legally finalized, including Cofepris’s assignment to the Undersecretary for Prevention and Health Promotion.
In other words, the undersecretary does not yet have legal control of the National Center for the Health of Children and Adolescents (CENSIA) and the National Center for Preventive Programs and Disease Control, areas whose budget has practically doubled since 2021.
Lag continues in Cofepris; digitization opens hope
In the drug industry, they continue to be concerned about the backlog in procedures from the health regulator Cofepris. There are laboratories, they tell us, that have been waiting for a response for more than a year to obtain a health registration for a generic, when the regulatory time is six months.
Where they are seeing that things are moving thanks to changes such as digitization in Cofepris, is in procedures such as the second and subsequent extensions; there the answer is automatic. Likewise, they welcome the video-verifications with which the regulator intends to reduce attention times to obtain certificates of good manufacturing practices (GMP’s), however for now they are only limited to international visits.
The expectation is that, with the changes applied by the federal commissioner Alejandro Svarch, the Cofepris operation will focus on dealing with backlogs and that the procedures that are entered now do come out in the times established by law.
Difficult for India to walk
And speaking of Cofepris, those who know tell us that the agreements in the visit to India, at least in relation to medicines, will remain in good wishes. Here the issue is that the Indian health agency is not of a high level, as are the agencies that the Mexican health regulator recognizes, already being at the level reached before PAHO/WHO.
Currently, they add, the only way for fast-track Indian products to be accepted or GMP’s for Indian products to be recognized is for them to be issued by strict and high-level agencies such as the US FDA or the European EMA or for the product to enter by request. from health institutions (under equivalence agreement to bring medicines without health registration).
Journalist on economics and health issues
Health and Business
Communicator specialized in public health and the health industry. She is studying a master’s degree in Health Systems Administration at FCA of UNAM.
Founder in 2004 of www.Plenilunia.com, a concept on women’s health. I am passionate about researching and reporting on health, innovation, the industry related to science, and finding the objective business approach to each topic.