LatinNews Daily - 29 May 2024

*A leading Colombian private health insurer (EPS), Sura, has announced that it has asked the healthcare regulator for permission to withdraw from Colombia’s social security system. Sura said in a statement that it was receiving insufficient government funding to cover the costs of increased expenses, and that “unlimited coverage and services contrast with an insufficient budget”. As a result, Sura said that it registered net losses of Col$360bn (US$93.8m) between 2022 and 2023, and is forecasting further losses of up to Col$500bn in 2024. Under Colombia’s healthcare model, which President Gustavo Petro’s government is seeking to reform, EPSs act as intermediaries between patients and healthcare providers and receive additional state funding on top of the revenue raised from patients’ health insurance policies. In response to accusations that the government is deliberately underfunding private insurers to force their withdrawal from the market, Colombia’s presidency yesterday released a statement saying that “it is not true that the national government is destroying the health system” and that “the crisis of the EPSs is the result of structural and systemic problems that have built up over the years”. Sura’s decision to wind down its operations in Colombia comes after the healthcare regulator last month staged an intervention in two other private health insurers – Nueva EPS and Sanitas EPS, on the same day that a senate commission voted to archive the government’s health reform bill.