“Move for your health” is the motto chosen by the White Tides to demonstrate this Sunday (in Cádiz, Saturday) to defend public health in Andalusia. By chance, the mobilizations in the eight provincial capitals come at a crucial moment in the management of the Moreno government, whose director of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) has just been summoned to court for investigation for a possible offense of administrative prevarication . for allegedly abusing the emergency contracting system once the pandemic was over. The coordinator, also from a judicial point of view, had bad news this week since her complaints due to the collapse of health waiting lists were unsuccessful.
This Wednesday, the coordinator of health tides tried to heat up the atmosphere to obtain the greatest possible impact from his appeal during an online press conference in which he accused the Council of “saturation of care” in care primary schools in general, and in rural areas in particular, and the “reconversion of health care” that the administration seems to want to propose, according to him, to “benefit the private sector”, accusing the Andalusian president of encouraging “health care health for the rich” to “I don’t don’t want to solve the public meltdown.”
The mobilization mainly aims to warn of the “deterioration of public health” which, according to the organization, “reaches an extreme severity that we can no longer tolerate”. “Long waiting lists generate complications in chronic diseases, even in some cases, due to lack of timely care, irreversible disease situations and death. In the same way, treatment times in health centers are already calculated between two weeks and up to thirty days in certain cases,” they argue.
Mareas Blancas insists that faced with the “irresponsibility and mismanagement” of the Andalusian government, “we cannot remain indifferent, we cannot stop expressing our greatest indignation and our rejection of the situation” . Among the reasons to mobilize citizens, they ask for “measures aimed at strengthening public health, an end to budgetary transfers of public money to private health, an increase in staff in health centers and hospital services, and an active role for citizens in this whole process.” This is happening because of the serious irresponsibility of the management of the Andalusian Government.
As they explained during the press conference, “these are not specific management errors but rather a well-designed strategy which involves, first and foremost, the deterioration of public health – mainly primary health care – and the ‘chronification of waiting lists, to allow the expansion of private health care. “It is a strategy aimed at generating a health reconversion that gives rise to a dual health service model where an impoverished, saturated and deteriorated public health system will serve the elderly, people with complicated chronic illnesses or with a history of oncology, multiple pathologies or cardiovascular diseases.”, specifies the coordinator.
This type of patients “are not sought by private health care because they are too expensive for the calculation of their services”, while “private health care, with companies, mostly multinationals, increases their activities, their policies and their infrastructures, increasing their expansion to the expenditure of public money under the self-righteous slogan of ‘public-private collaboration’, which is nothing other than an obvious parasitization of the public budget for the benefit of private benefit”, they conclude by Marea Blanca.
As this newspaper reported this week, the six major corporate beneficiaries of this year’s SAS concerts – Grupo Quirón, HLA (Asisa), Viamed, Vithas, Red Cross and the Hospitaller Order of San Juan de Dios – have joined forces forces in various Andalusian provinces for UTEs (Temporary Business Unions), which share 80% of the market, eight out of ten patients are oriented from the public to the private sector to reduce the inflated lists waiting in Andalusia.
There is a great coincidence between the companies that benefited from the emergency contracts signed by the SAS between 2021 and 2023, which the Seville court is investigating. Along the way, a good handful of small and medium-sized businesses began to denounce, after Monday’s publication in this newspaper, that the 2024 hiring process was not much different from the one that motivated the accusation of the three last leaders of SAS.
The defense of public health by Coordinadora, in addition to the mobilizations of this Sunday, also involves the treatment in Parliament of a Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP) with which it is committed to “100% public health” in Andalusia, presenting 40 000 signatures of support although, as they declared during their rally last week at the gates of Parliament, they hope to “obtain many more as a demonstration of the support of Andalusian citizens”.
