SDP President Luis Montenegro criticized Prime Minister António Costa’s “stubbornness” and lack of response from health services on Saturday, stressing that more than 1.7 million Portuguese do not have a family doctor.
During a dinner in Pombal that ended the Leiria week, Luis Montenegro advocated “greater flexibility in the management of medical institutions.”
“Because there is a lack of human resources in public administration, in the National Health Service, we are obliged to cooperate, to hire IPSS services. [Instituições Particulares de Solidariedade Social], the social sector and even some sectors or some companies in the private sector to fill the gap in the public response by thinking about people. Dr. António Costa has known about this for a long time, but due to his stubbornness, he continues to pretend that this is not a way out of health problems,” the PSD President stressed.
The Social Democrat also recalled that the prime minister “promised that all Portuguese would be assigned a family doctor.”
“Well, this week we again broke, with the hand of the Socialist Party and Dr. Antonio Costa, the record of the Portuguese without a family doctor. Today, more than 1.7 million Portuguese do not have [sábado] a family doctor,” he stressed, adding that in the district of Leiria, “on average, about a third of users in each municipality do not have a family doctor.”
Health, continued the leader of the Social Democrats, “is a clear failure of the PS and Dr. António Costa.”
“We are spending almost twice as much on SNS than we spent seven years ago. They put an end to the private management of public hospitals, the so-called public-private partnership. It is under this government and under this prime minister that we have more than 3.3 million Portuguese who had to take out health insurance, to which another 1.2 million have ADSE plus some subsystems,” he explained.
In other words, he said, “in round numbers, half of the Portuguese population is already paying, in addition to taxes, one more contribution to have a minimal answer in terms of access to healthcare.”
The leader of the Social Democratic Party also considered that not only “the life of the people is worse”, but also “the life of the country”.
“We are at the end of the European Union in terms of quality of life and at the end of the European Union, and this is not only in terms of the level of wealth that we are able to create. We are worse because the National Health Service is spending almost twice as much as I spent in 2014 and 2015, and the service is worse,” he cited the example, insisting that “the country is in a cycle of impoverishment.”
Luis Montenegro also recalled that whenever PSD proposes to return to a public-private partnership to solve a health problem, it is accused of “protecting the social sector or even the private health sector.”
“Don’t be fooled. In Portugal, the best friends of private healthcare are the socialists and their politics,” he said.
Emphasizing the importance of the people, the SDP president, having already visited eight districts of the country, discovered that “there are two Portugals.”
“This is not a country of Power Points and not pompous meetings of Dr. António Costa, government and PS. […] António Costa and PS, today [sábado] prime minister and party numbers. However, for us, the Portuguese are not numbers. The Portuguese are people and should be treated like people,” he defended.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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