Photo: picture alliance/dpa/J. GOITIA / Deutsche Welle
López Obrador justified his decision by indicating that Mexico has a deficit of about 50,000 general practitioners and specialists, and that many professionals are reluctant to be assigned to remote or hard-to-reach areas. As an example, he cited that there is a lack of pediatricians in rural areas.
“We do not have specialists to go to work in hospitals, in the poorest areas , further away,” assured the leftist president during his daily conference at the National Palace, in Mexico City.
Doctors would go to Guerrero, one of the poorest states
The president requested the contract from his Cuban counterpart, Miguel Díaz-Canel, during a visit to Havana on May 8, in which it was also agreed to buy pediatric vaccines against covid from the island-19.
According to what he said, Cuban doctors will be sent to areas such as Tlapa, a municipality in the state of Guerrero (south), considered one of the most impoverished in the country. “We are contracting all the doctors, but since we know that we are not going to have to cover the entire network of health centers, rural medical units, hospitals, that is why we are making this agreement to bring 500 doctors”, he insisted.
Mexicans reject “relegation of professionals nationals”
The Mexican authorities had already employed a similar number of Cuban professionals in 2020 to address the coronavirus pandemic. Mexican medical associations reject that the government go to these doctors, considering that this is “unfairly relegating” the country’s professionals.
” These foreign doctors do not meet the required competencies, they do not have duly specified functions, they do not have the requirements established by current laws”, the Federations, Associations and Medical Colleges of Mexico recently stated in a statement.
López Obrador disqualified these statements considering that “they do not like free health because they consider health to be a privilege” and defend “that anyone who has money can be treated to pay”, he remarked.
López Obrador also maintained that Cuban doctors will earn as much as Mexicans and that he does not interfere in the way in which Havana pays their salaries, in the face of complaints from Mexican opponents that the Cuban government is carrying out an unfair distribution of e those resources.
jov (afp, Forbes.com.mx)