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It is a response to the Open Letter written by the current president and five other former presidents of doctors, in which they left an appeal to the Minister of Health for greater recourse to the private and social sector. In an opinion article, 41 doctors consider that the Open Letter “fits into a broader movement of interventions by ‘influencers’ in the media and in the university media, all with the same orientation and the same substance.”
The answer, published in PUBLIC, is signed by 41 doctors, among them the former minister Ana Jorge, the former president of the Southern section of the Order of Doctors Jaime Mendes and the president of the Portuguese Association for the Protection of Diabetics José Manuel Boavida. In this letter, they affirm that they do not feel represented by the Open Letter issued by the current and former presidents.
“The implementation of the proposal for the operationalization of the so-called ‘health system’, with the ‘normalization’ of the purchase of health services from private providers, would subvert the constitutional concept of the National Health Service. With this proposal, only deficiencies were pointed out to the NHS, as well as what the Portuguese would have to pay for their health. The direction of the improvement of the SNS is exactly the opposite: reinforcement of internal capacity, to better serve the population in all health needs and not only in those that profit ”, they defend.
For these doctors, “the exemplary response of the NHS in the first wave was not only due to the disinterest of doctors and other professionals”. “It was also due to the structure and spirit of the SNS”, they say, giving examples of the complementarity between the public and private sectors based on data from 2018, in which “6,657.7 million euros were used to buy services from individuals ”, and the response to the pandemic:“ And, at the moment when the NHS is doing some 20,000 daily RT-PCR tests to SARS-VOC-2, 55% of which in the private sector, the flow money has increased a lot (600 thousand euros / day) that the state leaves for the private sector ”.
In response to the president, they emphasize that all citizens have the right to express their opinions. But they say: “What is not lawful is that the natural credibility of the Ordem dos Médicos is mobilized for the personal positions of the former presidents and its current president.”
