ADESA says Dominican Republic health system is in intensive care

The Alliance for the Right to Health (ADESA) will take a walk in the capital on Sunday, December 5, for a set of claims that include more significant investment and better quality of health spending, the signing of a political and social pact to prioritize and to relaunch the sector and preparing a ten-year plan focused on promoting a healthy life and preventing diseases.

ADESA also advocates the expansion of the coverage of services and the elimination of the co-payment of the contributory regime of the Family Health Insurance after considering that the Health Risk Insurers (ARS) cheat the working class by limiting services that it pay in advance.

«The country’s health system is in intensive care, as shown by all the health indicators. Every day in the Dominican Republic an average of 9 live newborns die before their 28th birthday; maternal deaths continue to exceed 200 per year, cardiovascular diseases are the main causes of death due, among other reasons, to an alarming deficit in public hospitals of cardiologists and equipment. On the other hand, the increase in diabetes, obesity and many other preventable diseases continues,” ADESA said.

It adds: «The State, political parties and social organizations cannot sit back in the face of a problem as severe as the health crisis. That is why ADESA will march. That is why ADESA proposes a political and social pact for health.

This coalition, which brings together hundreds of organizations and social institutions from all over the country, is convinced that public investment must prioritize the health of the people, which is a fundamental right as enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic in its article 61.

«Prioritizing health would mean refocusing health policy to protect and promote life, increase investment, develop a primary care strategy, rescue the role of government stewardship and overcome improvisation, politicking and the managerial disorder that predominates in the institutions public,” the alliance said.

“The Covid came to undress the country’s health system, highlighting its great weaknesses,” said Alba Reyes, general coordinator of ADESA, leading a press conference on Monday.

Reyes explained that if the country had had a primary care strategy, a large part of the more than 4 thousand deaths caused by the pandemic would have been avoided.

At the press conference where the march was announced, which will start from Enriquillo Park and conclude at Independencia Park, ADESA presented a ten-point program as the basis for signing a health pact.

On Sunday, November 7, the march will leave at ten in the morning from Enriquillo Park and will conclude at Independencia Park.

On the other hand, ADESA ruled against the measure ordered by the Government to deny medical assistance to the Haitian immigrant population residing in the country, including pregnant women. ADESA described that measure as unfair, discriminatory, illegal, and aberrant.

The alliance further said that President Luis Abinader must rectify and annul the decision mentioned above, which is also inadmissible due to the humanitarian and political crisis in Haiti, the worst in its history,

It is correct to reinforce border surveillance and seek the regularization of the migratory status of the Haitian population in the country, always in compliance with human rights and guaranteeing the dignity of people, ADESA said.

The alliance called on the population’s sanity and humanistic principles to overcome fanaticism, irrationality, and xenophobia, which some minority sectors promote inside and outside the state power.