Montenegro criticizes Costa’s “obstinacy” and the lack of response from the health services
The PSD leader defended the “greater agility in running the health units”, and noted that the prime minister had “promised all Portuguese to appoint a family doctor”.
• Photo: Antonio Cotrim/Lussa
Louis Montenegro
On Saturday, the head of the PSD, Luis Montenegro, criticized Prime Minister Antonio Costa’s “obstinacy” and the lack of response by health services, stressing that more than 1.7 million Portuguese do not have a family doctor.
During a dinner in Pombal, which concluded a week dedicated to the province of Leiria, Luis Montenegro advocated “more flexibility in the management of health units”.
“Since there are not enough human resources in the public administration, in the National Health Service, we have an obligation to partner, to recruit IPSS services. [Instituições Particulares de Solidariedade Social]And the social sector and even some sectors or some companies in the private sector to bridge the public response gap by thinking about people. Dr. Antonio Costa has known this for a long time, but because of his insistence on continuing to pretend that this is not the way out of health problems,” the PSD chief emphasized.
The Social Democrat also noted that the prime minister “promised that a family doctor would be appointed for all Portuguese”.
“Well, this week we broke again, with the help of the Socialist Party and Dr. Antonio Costa, the record of Portuguese without a family doctor. There are more than 1.7 million Portuguese who do not have it today [sábado] He emphasized the family doctor,” adding that in the province of Leiria, “about a third of the users in each municipality, on average, do not have a family doctor.”
Health, the leader of the Social Democrats continued, “a complete failure of the Socialist Party and Dr. Antonio Costa”.
“We have spent twice as much on social networking services as we did seven years ago. They have ended private management within public hospitals, the so-called public-private partnerships. And we have with this government and with this prime minister more than 3.3 million Portuguese who have had to take out health insurance , and another 1.2 million have ADSE, plus some subsystems,” he explained.
In other words, he said, “in rough numbers, half of the Portuguese population already pays, in addition to taxes, another contribution to have a minimum response in terms of access to health care.”
The PSD leader also considered that not only “people’s lives are worse”, but also “country life”.
“We are at the end of the quality of life within the EU and at the end of the EU not only in terms of the level of wealth we can create. We are even worse off, because as an example, the NHS is spending almost twice as much as it did in 2014 and 2015, And the service is even worse.”
Luis Montenegro also noted that whenever the PSD proposes the return of public-private partnerships to solve the 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 health are the socialists and their politics,” he said.
In highlighting the importance of people, the head of the PSD, having already visited eight regions in the country, found that “there are two Portuguese.”
This is not a country of ‘powerpoints’, nor the resonant sessions of Dr. Antonio Costa, the government and the Socialist Party. […] Antonio Costa and PS, today [sábado] They are the prime minister and the party of numbers. However, for us, the Portuguese are not numbers. He argued that the Portuguese are a people and should be looked at and treated as people.”
