Paraguay: silent privatization of healthcare

teleSUR English

In Paraguay, healthcare workers and opposition legislators are denouncing that President Santiago Peña and the Colorado Party are moving toward the privatization of public health services. Reports indicate that $28 million has been awarded to the company Canofta in what critics describe as a non-transparent process. Our colleague Osvaldo Zayas provides more details. teleSUR

Transcript

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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