LatinNews Daily - 06 June 2024

*A Colombian private health insurer (EPS), Salud Bolívar, has announced its intention to withdraw from Colombia’s social security system. It said in a statement that this decision was reached at a meeting of shareholders and was triggered by “external factors”. The withdrawal from the social security system of Salud Bolívar, which has some 3,500 affiliates who mostly live in the capital Bogotá, follows the same move by the much larger EPS Sura on 28 May. Sura, which has over 5m affiliates, blamed its exit on insufficient fund transfers from President Gustavo Petro’s government. Under the Colombian healthcare model, which Petro is intent on reforming, private health insurers receive additional state funding on top of the revenue raised from members’ health insurance policies. As well as the exit from the market of Sura and Salud Bolívar, Colombia’s healthcare regulator also intervened in two other private insurers, Sanitas and Nueva EPS, in April, after they entered financial difficulties. Opposition legislators have argued that the government is deliberately underfunding the insurers to force their exit from the market or their takeover by the regulator, after the government’s health reform bill was rejected in the senate in April.