Mexico's Healthcare Future: A Matter of Public Policy
STORY INLINE POST
Q: What essential points must a government health program address? How can Funsalud contribute?
A: All we need is the political will and an open and public commitment to improve the national health system within 20 years. The government must be sensible enough to recognize that healthcare is a pending issue in Mexico. This model has been functioning for the past 30 years and has proven its obsolescence and exhaustion. The new system should guarantee public resources for the sector and reconsider a new financial scheme. It would be ideal to establish a single tax in which everyone contributes to achieving universal healthcare. Many people say that this is not possible, but it is not an option. Universal healthcare is an obligation formulated in the Mexican Constitution.
The ideal universal system should cover a list of conditions and should allow all service providers to compete for every single payer. This would position the patient at the center of the system, provide service portability and promote unique electronic medical records.
Q: How can prevention become a priority for the system?
A: Establishing a preventive system and an efficient first level of attention is key. We must reinforce the authority of the health institutions over other economic sectors to control the health risks involved in their activities. There should be a National Health Council that invites all ministries to include in their plans chapters focused on healthcare. In addition, each government unit should report its improvements to the Ministry of Health.
Q: What have been the most important research topics for Funsalud in recent years?
A: We have focused on establishing the costs related to obesity, overweight and diabetes, which already represent more than 2 percent of GDP. We have also worked with palliative care and extreme pain because in Mexico there are many people living with chronic pain. The chances of dying in conditions of extreme pain are very high in Mexico and this is a consequence of the defects in the supply chain for analgesics. In oncology departments, for example, there is not enough injectable morphine and families do not have
the option to buy other products because they are more expensive. A pain medication costs MX$170 and usually chronic patients need between two and three daily. This is not acceptable and it is not fair.
Q: What can companies in the health sector do to make prevention a profitable activity?
A: Government policy must promote well-being within companies and the IMSS must identify the level of risk that every company must take when caring for its employees’ health. There should be a fiscal stimulus for those companies that monitor the health of their employees and a reward for those who reduce the number of absences. Without an incentive for the companies, it will not be easy to include a care culture.
Q: How do we ensure Mexico is nurturing the human resources its healthcare sector demands?
A: The priority specialization should be general medicine as we need more specialized communitarian doctors. They will be the ones who will identify the epidemics that we are struggling with. The doctors in the first level do not have enough knowledge to identify early-stage cancer symptoms, but if they are specialized they will be capable of doing that.
Q: What are Funsalud’s plans for 2018?
A: First, establish a performance evaluation system for hospitals to promote an evaluation, transparency and results culture. The purpose is to have a benchmarking of all the hospitals to develop an annual index of the best institutions and to begin with a pilot program in private hospitals. Second, we would like to conduct a study on state-of-the-art IT for health to identify the trends in technology and the legal frameworks under which they operate. We will also like to analyze successes and failures to position Mexico in healthcare innovation and see where we are.