Yolanda Díaz warns of the “danger” of the Feijóo health model: “It’s called save yourself who can”

Yolanda Díaz has taken advantage of the tailwind of the protests in Madrid for public health to issue a warning to society about the model of the Popular Party embodied by Alberto Núñez Feijóo. “It is a conception that has to do with dismantling public health resources, linked to health businesses. The PP model is called ‘every man for himself’”, the second vice president said this Saturday at a sectoral meeting on this issue of the Sumar platform.

As part of the meetings and conversations that the Minister of Labor is holding to shape her electoral platform, Díaz has brought together several experts on the health system in Madrid this weekend, such as Rafael Cofiño, who coordinates the work group on Sumar on Health and Mental Health; Tomás Zapata, regional adviser of the World Health Organization (WHO); the manager of the Barcelona Public Health Agency, Carme Borrell; o Araceli Ortiz, from the board of directors of the Federation of Public Health Defense Associations.

Díaz has listened to the contributions of fifteen experts and referents of social groups on this matter to later synthesize some of the proposals that his team is already designing with an eye on a program for the next elections and, as they strive to remember from Sumar, for the “next progressive decade”. “We are talking about one of the central pieces of the welfare state: health, the health of the people of our country, is the rudder on which the gaze of the State proposed by Sumar must be redirected”, he considered.

Faced with that progressive decade, Yolanda Díaz has warned of the “danger” posed by the Popular Party. “Right now we have a real danger. His name is Feijóo, his name is PP. We know this party’s health proposal very well”, assured the second vice president, who recalled that the management of the opposition leader when he was president of the Xunta de Galicia functioned as a “laboratory of ideas” for health privatization.

“Mr. Feijóo came to propose a rate for people who made use of health emergencies. It is true that the response of the Galicians and Galicians in the streets was so overwhelming that he had to withdraw it ”, recalled Díaz, who has insisted that the conservative conception means “dismantling public health resources ”. The dismantling has to do, he has pointed out, with building a two-speed health system. “Whoever has economic capacity to be cured and whoever doesn’t, what are we going to do”, he exemplified.

“In Galicia we have witnessed a deliberate privatization to cut waiting lists but then they are replicated in private clinics. There is a brutal economic business plot linked to the health sector and research”, continued Díaz, who has reviewed the neoliberal model of the United Kingdom from the 1970s and the most extreme paradigm represented by the United States, where, he has compared, a person who does not have the resources for a chemotherapy treatment will have “enormous” difficulties in being able to be cured.

Mental and oral health and the end of precariousness

Yolanda Díaz has argued that if the Spanish health system still reaches levels of international prestige it is because of the dedication and value of its professionals, but she has reasoned that the pandemic was a call for help, it revealed some of the latent deficits in the Spanish system. “A country in which we have 32% of professionals in precarious conditions is indecent, that percentage rises to 59% in those under 30. Professionals who sign contracts every two months. If we have precarious professionals, we have a precarious health system. This is what a democracy cannot afford in any way”, she has said.

Díaz has outlined some proposals to improve the system’s deficits. In the first place, he has urged the “renewal” of all health staff, “of all specialties.” On the other hand, he has asked to include mental health and oral health in the public system and has made a call to put primary care at the center of the system. “It is the one that has to nourish the rest of the system. We need to put primary care at the center ”, he said before forecasting a future with many possible pandemics. For this it is necessary, he has added, “to improve the system from top to bottom”.