Months to a year waiting for a doctor’s appointment and long wait times are just some of the problems patients suffer regarding Puerto Rico’s collapsing healthcare system.
The situation has worsened due to the exodus of doctors and the influence of insurance companies.
Independent congressman and president of the Puerto Rican Colegio de Médicos Cirujanos de Puerto Rico, Carlos Díaz, stated that the island’s healthcare system is “non-existent” or “disorganized.”
“When we talk about a country with a health care system, we can’t even mention it on Puerto Rico because it doesn’t even exist in the title,” said Vargas Vidot, a member of the Senate Health Committee and founder of an organization that helps drug addicts.
Díaz described the healthcare system in Puerto Rico, where 15 years ago there were 19,000 doctors, and today there are an average of 10,000, as “very fragmented, very disjointed and very disorganized.”
According to the cardiologist, part of the island’s healthcare system collapsed in 1993, when Pedro Rosselló, also a physician, began his first term as governor of Puerto Rico and decided to privatize health centers.
“The system collapsed; it was abolished. Pedro Rosselló was warned, and the system became political. Instead of serving the patients, it became a political issue,” Díaz recalls.
Before Rosselló’s tenure, Guillermo Arbona, a former health minister, had developed a project to regionalize the health system into three levels of healthcare in each of the seven regions of the Ministry of Health.
Díaz criticized that insurance companies were partly responsible for the health system’s collapse because they “control the system, the economic part and the medical control.”
According to Díaz, insurers determine the rates at which doctors bill patients for their services and even determine which medications doctors should prescribe, depending on insurance coverage.
“Who then dictates the policies in the system, me or the insurance company?” he asked about this situation, which has also been a determining factor in the exodus of Puerto Rican physicians to the United States.
Faced with this situation, the House of Representatives proposed a measure to create a national health plan to transform the Puerto Rican system into one with universal access and coverage, but the Department of Health rejected the initiative.
The precarious healthcare system in Puerto Rico concerns and worries the medical profession and patients.
Hospitals have also suffered in recent years from power outages caused by hurricanes or power outages.
In some cases, their operations were seriously affected when backup generators also failed
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