00:00We move on to Paraguay.
00:02Healthcare workers and opposition legislators denounced that the government of Santiago
00:06Peña and the conservative Colorado Party are privatizing public health services.
00:11Let's see more in the following report from our colleague Osvaldo Zayas.
00:18Legislators and workers' organizations have been denouncing asylum privatization of the
00:21public health system.
00:23For example, the Ministry of Health has awarded services worth $28 million to a private consortium
00:28called Canofta.
00:33President Santiago Peña, even during his campaign, said that Paraguay's health system should
00:37turn the Ministry of Health into a kind of central bank that manages funds and that all services
00:42should be privatized.
00:46In some way, he is now fulfilling what he said, but since there is public rejection of the privatization
00:51of the health system, he is doing it gradually.
00:54What he does is take certain services, certain areas of healthcare, and begins to outsource
00:58them.
00:59The National Doctors' Union claims that the privatization being carried out by the Colorado
01:08Party multiplies service costs five-fold.
01:10In 2025, the Diagnostic and Imaging Center outsourced services to the private company, Metrotech,
01:17for a value of $45 million.
01:19The little that is allocated to health is given to outsourcing and privatization, which ends
01:27up multiplying expenses five-fold.
01:31Instead of paying, for example, $600,000 guarantees for a medical study within a public institution,
01:36the cost is being doubled, tripled, or even quintupled when paying a private company.
01:42The Paraguayan Medical Circle also denounced that the privatization of services not only
01:51hands over public resources to private companies, but also constitutes a new source of corruption.
01:57It stated that the Ministry of Health has accumulated debts of more than $500 million.
02:02The money being spent is precisely what is missing to make healthcare services equitable and equal
02:09across all of Paraguay.
02:11Because it is not enough to build small, extraordinary hospitals at the expense of the entire service
02:16network, which lacks supplies, lacks medicines, lacks specialists, it lacks, it lacks.
02:22Both the Paraguayan Nursing Association and unions of the Social Security Institute,
02:31the country's main social security entity, systematically reject the deterioration of the healthcare
02:36system as well as the fact that the government is turning a basic right into a commodity.
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