🏥Cancer and high-cost care· 2015-2025

INCA leased an accelerator and the end of the waiting list was announced

In 2015 ASSE leased the country's second accelerator for ten years and announced there would be no more queue. In 2023 the institute had 20 to 25 patients waiting.

UnfinishedQuestioned management

Figure published by the sources

«El arrendamiento tiene un costo mensual próximo a los 20.000 dólares» por el acelerador lineal del INCA, contrato a diez años (Presidencia y Montevideo Portal, 2015)

Bodies involved

Instituto Nacional del Cáncer · Administración de los Servicios de Salud del Estado (ASSE)

What it is

On 22 June 2015 ASSE inaugurated at the National Cancer Institute (INCA) the country's second linear accelerator for radiotherapy —the first was at the Hospital de Clínicas— with intensity-modulated radiotherapy and 120-leaf collimators. It was not a purchase: a ten-year lease was awarded through public tender which, according to ASSE, included preventive and corrective maintenance "full risk, with spare parts and labour included", a technological upgrade after five years and a guarantee of operation for 97% of use time, with penalties for non-compliance. Presidencia and Montevideo Portal reported that "the lease has a monthly cost close to 20,000 dollars".

What is questioned

The president of ASSE's board, Susana Muñiz, described the contract as "an innovative form of contracting that also follows the recommendations of international bodies on atomic energy safety", and INCA director Álvaro Luongo said that with the equipment the country "matches first-world countries". Presidencia's headline said the technology "brings the waiting list to zero" and Montevideo Portal reported that, with two accelerators, "ASSE assures there will no longer be a waiting list for this type of treatment". Eight years later, on 12 July 2023, El Observador reported that INCA maintained "a waiting list of between 20 and 25 people to receive this type of radiotherapy". On 23 October 2025 the institute's current director, Mauricio Cuello, told El Explorador: "We have a significant share of vacant posts", and described a deficit of specialists in pathology and radiotherapy, the need for medical physicists as a national problem, and years of surgical equipment left un-updated.

Why it matters to you

INCA is the public system's reference cancer centre. That a ten-year contract was presented as the end of waiting lists and that eight years later there was still a queue, with vacant posts and a shortage of medical physicists, suggests the problem is not solved by buying or leasing machines alone.

Where it stands

Unfinished

On 23 November 2023 ASSE presented an owned linear accelerator at INCA, with a reported investment of US$1,336,000 to make it operational, according to Presidencia. In October 2025 Cuello told El Explorador there was a tender under way to add latest-generation radiotherapy and that the mammography information node processes "between 1,400 and 1,500 studies a month". As of this file's closing date (August 2026) there is nothing on record after October 2025 about that tender.

The open-data cross-reference

What the state awarded to the bodies and companies named in this file, according to the official Compras Estatales data. It is a cross-reference for scale, not proof of irregularity: it includes contracts nobody questioned.

How this cross-reference was builtcontracts whose object mentions “acelerador lineal” · everything recorded under 88 buying units of the named bodies (not only this case) · between 2015 and 2025

$ 290.960.647 Awarded (cross-ref)

103Contracts

16Suppliers

Who was paid

Suppliers ranked by amount awarded in the cross-reference. A contract with several suppliers counts in full against each one: this is a ceiling, not a split.

Which body paid

What it bought

Spending by category, from price times quantity of each awarded item, in the contract currency.

Contracts per year

The detail

30 contracts

The largest contracts in the cross-reference, high to low. Tap one for its record and the link to the official purchase.

Amounts in pesos, normalised. Records with impossible quantities are excluded from the total. The 2015 lease was awarded through public tender and should be traceable in state procurement data, as should the later maintenance contracts. Vacant posts and the shortage of medical physicists do not show up in procurement data: they are staffing budget. The sources do not allow the waiting list to be reconstructed between 2015 and 2023.