The President of the Republic, Gustavo Petro, denounced the excessive cost of medicines in Colombia, pointing out that this situation makes access to treatment more difficult and affects the recovery of patients. According to the president, “they raise drug prices two or three times to cheat Colombia,” alluding to the need for Latin American countries to produce their own medicines to avoid middlemen who raise prices.
The Superintendent of Industry and Commerce, Cielo Rusinque, responded to the complaint, revealing that as of August 2025, cost overruns of up to 7,000% were found in several IPSs in the country. “Mr. President, I wish it was two or three times the additional costs. The regulator has found that wholesalers and IPS have exceeded the maximum prices for medicines with cost surcharges of up to 7,000%,” explained Rusinque.
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In response, Petro called the price hike “the biggest theft from the country’s health and system.” The president specified that “the additional cost of medicines in 2023 was 700,000,000,000 pesos. It is the theft of health that the opposition wants to perpetuate,” he wrote on his X account.
The head of state’s defense did not stop, as he assured on the same platform that the Health Promotion Entities (EPS) were responsible for the crisis in the Colombian health system. From their perspective, the way they work led to the closure of hospitals and clinics due to a lack of resources.
“They took the health money. Vertical integration in the EPS is the biggest evil of the system, that’s why they bankrupted private and public hospitals and clinics, so that those owned by the owner of the EPS, That shouldn’t exist, give maximum profits and that’s how they take your money,” explained Petro.
In return, he took the opportunity to launch an attack against the owner of EPS Sanitas, whom he accused of negotiating with the health of Colombians.
“Either you are an EPS or you are a clinic owner, not both, because they draw from public resources, numbers and research that are the friends of the owner of Keralty.” “In power, they will not be able to wipe them out,” the president said.
And he added: “The EPSs sold 8.3 million drugs with warnings in their health record in 2023.”
The State Council ordered President Gustavo Petro to publicly correct his statements against Joseba Grajales, the owner of EPS Sanitas, after deeming that he had violated the businessman’s fundamental rights by accusing him of crimes without a court verdict. The decision obliges the President to make a correction under conditions of distribution equivalent to those of the President’s speech in which he made the statements.
The Supreme Court ruling modified the first instance ruling and protected Grajales’ rights by concluding that while the president can criticize the management of the health system and the EPS, he is not allowed to attribute criminal behavior to a person without a court decision. The court emphasized that the correction must respect the good name and presumption of innocence of the entrepreneur and that it must have a similar media reach as the original statements.
The origin of the controversy dates back to July 25, 2025, when Petro, in an official intervention, referred to the financial situation of Sanitas, a company that was at that time intervened by the National Superintendency of Health. During the speech, the President explained: “Then they took Sanitas away from us and it turned out that we reduced the debt because the theft is immense, but we reduced it, that is, the intervention was cheap and if you add everything up, we reduced the total debt of this EPS by 707 billion pesos.”
The Council of State considered particularly serious the statements in which Petro directly referred to the owner of the Keralty Group, the multinational conglomerate that owns Sanitas. In this intervention, the President stated: “It is forbidden for a company like Keralty to pay politicians. The politician who receives this money is a criminal. He is attacking the life of Colombia and the owner of Keralty is a criminal in Colombia and must go.”
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