THE APPROVAL of the health reform in the plenary session of the Chamber in the second debate tends to be complicated, since five representatives of the bench of Alianza Verde Centro Verde Esperanza Coalición, who are part of the government bloc, announced that they will vote against the initiative . Yesterday the representative Catherine Juvinao said that this initiative is “crooked.”
The health project, which is part of the three major reforms that the National Executive filed in the first semester, along with pensions and labor, was approved the previous week in the Seventh Commission of the Chamber with the votes of the coalition of government, made up of the Historical Pact, the Green Alliance and some minority movements.
On that occasion, La U, an independent party, and El Liberal, which has an internal conflict, also voted in favor of most of the articles of the reform, since one part of the bench wants to remain in the ruling party, while another proposes to march to independence.
The Government hopes that the health reform will be approved in the second debate in this legislature that ends on June 20. However, the transit of the project in the plenary session of the Chamber began to get complicated last Thursday, when it was barely possible to advance in the discussion of the impediments, because five members of the caucus of the Alianza Verde-Coalición Verde Esperanza presented a proposal to file, which caused surprise in the Historical Pact.
The annoyance of the representative Martha Alfonso, a member of the Historical Pact and speaker in the first debate of the project, who angrily demanded the file proposal from the green sector, was visible.
Yesterday, representative Juvinao told RCN Radio that “it is a ‘crooked’ reform because it was born without sufficient agreement and from the beginning several parties, in fact, together with Senator Humberto de la Calle and myself, we said that this had to be a statutory law”, and not ordinary as presented by the Government.
He added that: “after four months of study carried out by various congressmen, experts, academics, sector organizations, and even former executives, we came to the conclusion that it is a reform that is poorly focused in its content.”
In addition to Juvinao, the green awnings signed the file proposal for the reform, Daniel Carvalho, Katherine Miranda, Cristian Danilo Avendaño and Carolina Giraldo Botero.
Daniel Carvalho shared that “we need a reform that has legitimacy, broad debate, legal certainty and sufficient social consensus.”
For his part, representative Avendaño said yesterday that among other reasons why he decided to support the proposal to file the health reform, is that “the Seventh Commission made multiple procedural errors, such as not reading proposals, not submitting consideration proposals, vote in gigantic blocks the articles of the reform”.
Added, likewise “We warned that it should be processed as statutory law through the First Commission and not as ordinary law through the Seventh Commission. And yet they decided to move forward at all costs.”
He also said that there are multiple uncertainties in the transition process to the new system. “For example, the ADRES is going to go from auditing 50,000 accounts to auditing 8 million accounts”, and it is not clear how it will do it.
Just as the Superintendence of Health strengthens its functions, but neither “we are certain of the institutional and financial strengthening. Apart from that, the Superintendency answers to the President, the Adres that manages the resources answers to the President. That is to say, there is no system of checks and balances for the control of the health system, and the control systems through the councils that exist territorially are not binding, ”he emphasized.
In the same way, he stated that the project does not contemplate a mechanism to fight corruption either, “there are no accountability processes, there are no processes of transparency in access to information, there is no clarity on how they are going to articulate the interoperability that has the information system”.
accounts that are made
The national government needs 95 votes in the plenary session of the Chamber for the approval of the health reform in its second debate. However, subtracting the support of the five parliamentarians of the Green Alliance who are dissatisfied with the initiative, it would reach approximately 93 votes.
In this sense, the challenge is great for the Minister of the Interior, Luis Fernando Velasco, and of Health, Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo, to obtain more support, especially in the Liberal and La U parties, to save it.