The parties accused the Executive on Wednesday of mismanagement of the health sector, recalling the recent resignation of Marta Temido, with PSD and PCP criticizing the SNS Statute and Chega speaking of “chaos.”
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The deputies intervened during the period of political declarations, in the meeting of the Permanent Commission —a body that functions in the Assembly of the Republic during the vacation recess— before the debate with the Government on inflation.
João Dias, from the PCP, was the first to criticize the majority executive of the PS, pointing out that “it is the lack of response from the SNS that creates space for patients to be sent to private“.
“The Government passively observed the weakening of the SNS, allowing the degradation of the working conditions of health professionals, on the other hand, the measures it took were to make the SNS even more dependent on the private sector, as evidenced by the recently published Statute of the SNS, which constitutes an evident setback in relation to the new Basic Health Law, approved in 2019, aggravating the promiscuity between the public and the private spheres,” he said.
For the communists, the new statute of the SNS “comes to include as units of the SNS the private institutions with which the public service establishes contracts”, “allows the transfer of the operation of hospital clinical services to external entities” and “maintains the clear intention of returning to the ruinous Public-Private Partnerships in health“.
“It is not that the Government does not know what it can and should do, if not, it was enough to take into account the proposals that the PCP has presented. It is even by choice that he lets the public service slide towards degradation”, he underlined.
For the PSD, deputy Ricardo Baptista Leite warned that “the government wants to approve the statute of the SNS behind the back of the people, behind a smoke screen,” blaming António Costa for a “progressive degradation in the quality of care provided by the SNS”.
The Social Democrat also lamented that the executive has not advanced with the construction of hospitals in the country, referring that “the only equipment that is being built is being done with the money of the citizens of the municipality of Sintra” but this facility “will not have a single hospital bedbeing all for continued care.
“Everyone remembers the kitty with wings that the prime minister introduced to the country. Well, a hospital without hospital beds is like a cow without wings, it just doesn’t fly. But it’s all for propaganda,” he joked.
Recalling the resignation of Marta Temido, the deputy said that “changing the minister without changing the government’s health policies is like treating an open fracture with a plaster”, appealing to the Prime Minister to have “the humility to recognize that the Government failed in Health”.
“At a time when the country needs courage, we have a cowardly government,” he shot.
On behalf of Chega, deputy Diogo Pacheco de Amorim also recalled Marta Temido’s resignation and spoke of “chaos installed in health, bleeding of scarce resources” with “mismanagement, guided by ideology and not by the harsh reality of the facts“.
The rest of the deputy’s speech was dedicated to the draft resolution presented by Chega to censor the conduct of the president of parliament, Augusto Santos Silva.
The deputy said that the party’s institutional respect for Santos Silva was not at stake, but rather a question of freedom of expression.
“What is at stake is the greatest and irreplaceable asset of any democracy: freedom of expression. We can say clearly and unequivocally what we consider essential to say. There is, and this is indisputable, a common ground of democracy and that common ground is precisely that of freedom of speech and expression”, he underlined.
Source: Observadora
