The IESS lashes out against insurance companies

There is resistance. Patients and doctors question the government’s decision to charge companies of prepaid medicine for the attentions of their affiliates in the public sector.

That means that the companies will have to return to the State the costs of health care of their affiliates, for example, in the Ecuadorian Institute of Social Security (IESS).

This is stipulated in one of the articles of the Bill of prepaid medicine prepared by the Committee on the Rights to Health of the Assembly.

What would be the effect of this standard for citizens? The collection, for patients and doctors, is not a matter of social justice but of market. They fear that companies rise the cost of their services or terminate their contracts, they said to Daily Expreso.

According to Armando Mora, a patient with a kidney transplant, companies will pass the bill to the affiliates and will have to pay more for insurance. He suffers from kidney failure, a disease that left him paralyzed for eight years. He could not work, he told to this newspaper.

In 2013 he was made a kidney transplant and now receives IESS drugs, but he also has a private insurance. “We would have problems with prepaid companies if they decide to close the accounts of patients with catastrophic diseases,” he said (I).