The Government suspends the deadline for submitting offers to Muface and will make changes to the tender

The Ministry of Public Service has decided to suspend the deadline for submitting offers for Muface, which ended this Monday, with the aim of modifying the specifications to include “detected corrections.” This decision comes after weeks of conversations between the department headed by Óscar López and the insurers, mainly Adelas and Asisa, which are the ones with the highest volume of officials serving at this time.

With this movement, the Public Service once again gains time while trying to resolve a delicate issue, which has one and a half million people in suspense, including officials and their families, and about which there are different sensitivities within the Executive itself. Sumar’s wing, with the Ministry of Health, had been in favor of moving towards a model that would be extinguished.

The department headed by López had already extended the deadline for insurers to attend the concert by two weeks, after Adeslas and Asisa said they were resigning. Now, the deadline is suspended until the Ministry incorporates these “detected corrections”, without the resolution, published this Saturday on the public sector contracting portal, clarifying what they are. Although the current agreement ended on January 31, the Government played the card of a forced extension, so the companies that provided service are obliged to continue doing so until the tender is resolved.

This Friday, López had appeared “almost convinced” that an agreement would be reached. “I am optimistic, we are talking (with the insurers) and looking for a solution,” he said in an interview in OndaZeroin which he opened the door to the possibility of even some of the companies that had refused to participate in this second tender, Adeslas and DKV. This movement is read as a new movement to try to find some formula that compensates these private companies.

The insurers that pay attention to mutualists who opt for private healthcare over public healthcare, a little over one million and some 400,000 family members, have been stating for years that the model is underfinanced, with arguments such as the unit cost per patient lower than what is expected. public health allocates for those of the public or the increase in inflation and health costs. In fact, in total, they claim that in the extended concert they would have lost about 400 million euros.

Despite the fact that the mutual society issued a report in December indicating that insurers “do not provide evidence of costs” for an increase in the premium, the Executive, who wants to save the agreement at all costs and rethink the model in the coming three years, raised last week, in a response to Asisa about the tender, the possibility of compensating for the extraordinary costs of companies in unexpected situations, among which he cited runaway inflation or the health crisis. Sector sources understood this as a red carpet to claim these amounts, although they also indicated that there were ambiguities in the formulation of the response that they wanted to clarify to assess whether they could continue in the mutuality with full economic guarantees.

Adeslas, integrated into the Mutua Madrileña Group and owned by CaixaBank, had refused to participate in this tender, estimating that it would generate losses of around 250 million euros for the period 2025-2027, the same as those registered between 2022 and 2024. This is the company that most mutual members choose, so their decision then represented a headache for the administration: more than half a million people, followed by Asisa, with 364,000 beneficiaries and DKV, with almost 200,000. Meanwhile, 457,307 public workers choose public health.

This second tender represents a cumulative increase in the premium of 33.5% in three years, for a total amount of 4.5 billion euros. “The Government has made the greatest effort in history, no one can deny it. “It is an increase of 1,000 million additional euros to what we already had,” indicated the ministers, who noted that they were “exploring formulas.” Insurers had rejected a previous tender, with a 17% increase.

In the meantime, the Alliance for Spanish Private Health (ASPE), the sector’s employers’ association, also demanded direct dialogue from the Ministry. As they stated in a statement, from their conversations with insurers about the amount they would pay them for referring patients to their medical centers, “the economic improvements proposed in the negotiations would only benefit them.”