Over 15 thousand lawsuits issued against the AMLO administration for medicine shortages

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The AMLO administration is facing almost 16 thousand lawsuits for the shortage of medicines for cancer and diabetes.

The Cero Debasto and Nosotrxs collectives announced that 15,980 injunctions have been filed against the federal government for medicine shortages.

The shortage of medicines that exists in the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2021 caused 15,980 injunctions to be filed by rights holders who demanded access to drugs, particularly patients with cancer, diabetes, those who followed up on a transplant, and hypertensive patients, announced the groups Cero Debasto and Nosotrxs.

When presenting the Radiography of the Shortage. Transparency Report 2017-2021 prepared by Nosotrxs, Mamcy Manzo, an analyst for the Health and Well-being Cause of that organization, said that as a result of the shortage, counterfeiting and theft of supplies also grew in health sector institutions, registering 59 alerts about spell products or the 15 percent increase in the illegal marketing of drugs.

According to the organization, this occurs in the context of a change in the system for purchasing medicines and supplies, where Seguro Popular was replaced by the Instituto de Salud para el Bienestar (INSABI) and the Covid-19 pandemic in the country.

As a result of the pandemic, the units of the Ministry of Health considerably reduced the service between 2020 and 2021 and only granted half the consultations that in 2017, and nearly half a million fewer surgical procedures were performed.

The number of filled prescriptions decreased progressively in the different social security institutions of the country.

In 2021, a little more than 24 million prescriptions were not effectively filled in the main social security institutions -IMSS, ISSSTE, PEMEX, SEDENA, SEMAR- that make up the National Health System, “this represents 9.7 percent of prescriptions not filled, the highest figure of non-filling in the period 2017-2021.

Similarly, the number of complaints for non-supply of medicines registered in the vast majority of the institutions analyzed increased in 2021, for example, in the IMSS 11,369 were registered and in the ISSSTE 4,168, which represents an increase of 42.8 percent and 96.3 percent respectively in relation to 2020.

Regarding the reports issued by Cero Debasto, from its launch in 2019 to 2021, 7,996 reports have been collected, in 2021, a total of 3,237 were registered, which represents an increase of 31.5% compared to 2020. The CDMX, the State of Mexico, Guerrero, and Jalisco have the highest number of reports.

Four of the 10 hospitals with the highest reports belong to IMSS, three to ISSSTE and the rest correspond to INSABI (2) and PEMEX (1).

The pathologies with the most reports were: cancer, diabetes, post-transplant, hypertension, and those related to mental health.

In the balance of purchases by the government, INEFAM announced that 5.9 percent fewer medicines were purchased than in 2020, which is equivalent to 67 million pieces.

This has meant that patients have had to buy their medicine on their own, increasing out-of-pocket health spending by 40 percent, going from a monthly average of 2,358 pesos in 2018 to 3,299 in 2020.

“This report makes it clear that the problem of shortages has worsened in recent years and it is necessary to modify the strategy adopted until today by the current government to solve it,” Cero Debasto and Nosotrxs stated.

These groups emphasized that it is “a complex problem and it is not possible to solve it unilaterally, the participation of all sectors is needed to solve it, putting patients first.

Source: Cero Debasto and Nosotrxs