00:00In Paraguay, healthcare workers and opposition legislators denounced that the government
00:04of Santiago Peña and the Conservative Colorado Party are privatizing public health services.
00:09Let's see more in the following report from our colleague Osvaldo Sallas.
00:16Legislators and workers' organizations have been denouncing asylum privatization of the
00:19public health system.
00:21For example, the Ministry of Health has awarded services worth $28 million to a private consortium
00:26called Canofta.
00:27President Santiago Peña, even during his campaign, said that Paraguay's health system
00:35should turn the Ministry of Health into a kind of central bank that manages funds and that
00:40all services should be privatized.
00:44In some way, he is now fulfilling what he said, but since there is public rejection of the privatization
00:49of the health system, he is doing it gradually.
00:52What he does is take certain services, certain areas of healthcare, and begins to outsource
00:57them.
00:58The National Doctors' Union claims that the privatization being carried out by the Colorado
01:06Party multiplies service costs five-fold.
01:10In 2025, the Diagnostic and Imagine Center outsourced services to the private company Metrotech for
01:15a value of $45 million.
01:16The little that is allocated to health is given to outsourcing and privatization, which ends
01:26up multiplying expenses five-fold.
01:29Instead of paying, for example, 600,000 guarantees for a medical study within a public institution,
01:35the cost is being doubled, tripled, or even quintupled when paying a private company.
01:45The Paraguayan Medical Circle also denounced that the privatization of services not only
01:49hands over public resources to private companies, but also constitutes a new source of corruption.
01:55It stated that the Ministry of Health has accumulated debts of more than $500 million.
02:00The money being spent is precisely what is missing to make healthcare services equitable
02:07and equal across all of Paraguay.
02:10Because it is not enough to build small, extraordinary hospitals at the expense of the entire service
02:15network, which lacks supplies, lacks medicines, lacks specialists, it lacks, it lacks.
02:21Both the Paraguayan Nursing Association and unions of the Social Security Institute, the country's
02:30main social security entity, systematically reject the deterioration of the healthcare system,
02:35as well as the fact that the government is turning a basic right into a commodity.
02:42So let's go.
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