Colombia’s government files expanded referendum amid deepening rift with Congress – Colombia News

Colombia’s government filed a referendum that calls for a labor reform and a healthcare reform before Congress amid growing tensions between the two branches of government.

Less than a week after the Senate sunk the government’s referendum on labor reform, Interior Minister Armando Benedetti, Labor Minister Antonio Sanguino and Health Minister Guillermo Alonso Jaramillo filed a new one.

This second referendum included the 12 questions that were in the labor referendum and four new ones on Colombia’s troubled healthcare system.

Colombia’s government presents questions for labor reform referendum

According to the health minister, the government decided to add a healthcare reform to the expanded reform amid concerns that the Senate’s social policy commission, which is dominated by the opposition, planned to sink the healthcare reform that has been pending in Congress for years.

The same commission was responsible for sinking the labor reform in April.

If approved by voters, the healthcare reform included in the referendum would nationalize the purchase and distribution of medicines and the payment of treatments.

Medicines and treatments are currently the responsibility of for-profit healthcare intermediaries in many cases with catastrophic consequences for people who are in need of healthcare.

The four new questions

• Do you agree that the National Government should purchase or produce the necessary medicines to guarantee their full and timely delivery to patients?
• Do you agree that [healthcare intermediaries] EPS’s should cease to be financial intermediaries, become health managers and ADRES should pay hospitals and clinics directly?
• Do you agree that Colombians should be guaranteed a primary preventative and resolutive health care model, with an expansion of the necessary specialized services of a public, private and mixed nature?
• Do you agree with the establishment of a special labor regime that guarantees formal employment, labor rights and fair wages to health employees and workers?

Hours before going to Congress, labor unions and social organizations announced a 48-hour national strike in support of the government’s referendum and reform proposals.