“A decent, humanist country should not deny health services to foreigners”
PS secretary-general, Pedro Nuno Santos, has said today that the country has the means to combat fraudulent access to the State health service and that a decent and humanist country should not deny free health services to foreigners.
Yesterday, Pedro Nuno Santos stressed the government should be taking the warnings by the central bank governor of a return to deficit “very seriously”. Today, he appears to think the country should take the moral high ground before considering the tens of thousands of euros effectively ‘lost’ by caring for non-resident foreigners within the state health system.
“The country is not a rich country”, he admitted: Portugal does not have “a state health service (SNS) capable of offering healthcare to the world”, but it does have “means to combat abuse” in access to healthcare by foreign citizens without regularised status (albeit he does not say what these means are).
Recognising that there may be “fraudulent access” to the SNS, writes Lusa, the PS secretary general stated that in this case, it will be necessary to identify and dismantle “trafficking networks” and that the PSD’s proposals (to simply stop treating non-resident foreigners free of charge) “are not reasonable” because they mean, in practice, “prohibiting access to the SNS by immigrants and foreigners without their situation regularised”.
“It is one thing to find ways to charge”, it is another “to not even be human”, he said, questioning what response “a decent and humane country” should give to a foreign pregnant woman who arrives at a Portuguese maternity hospital to have her child.
Pedro Nuno Santos was speaking at the closing of the National Congress of Socialist Youth, Nazaré, in the district of Leiria, where he gave a speech in which he accused the government of “inability to solve concrete problems” and of “inventing others”, in order to “compete with CHEGA for the far-right electorate”.
The list of criticisms included the issue of immigration, “a problem that the government promised to resolve, but created a serious problem for Portugal by eliminating the concept of expression of interest from the law”, creating a gap in the law that makes it difficult to legalise workers when “the country needs labour”*.
“What is the Portuguese government going to do with the thousands of immigrants who have had their applications rejected?” he asked, recalling that, “without new workers” the country will not be able to “implement the Plan for Recovery and Resilience”*.
In addition to immigration and health, the main criticisms of the Socialist leader’s speech focused on one of the biggest concerns expressed by the Socialist youth, housing, an area in which Pedro Nuno Santos left the young participants in the congress with “the general commitment of (his) party” – the one that was in power for the last eight years, in which access to decent housing became more and more difficult – to have an “aggressive programme of construction, rehabilitation and construction of houses in Portugal”.
“In a highly inflated market, we must have the ambition to seriously intervene in housing,” he stated, defending the provision of homes “for the needy population”, but also “for the middle class” (again, something this government has also been at pains to tackle).
Pedro Nuno Santos also made a point of making it clear that there is/ was “no collusion” between his party and CHEGA (even though this lack of collusion has already pushed through a number of policies) and challenged the JS (Young Socialists) – which at the congress elected Sofia Pereira as secretary-general of Youth – to combat “the extreme right that has also been advancing among young people”.
Fighting the extreme right “is also fighting sexism, machismo, homophobia”, he stressed, highlighting the importance of JS in ‘combating the rollback of acquired rights’.
*in this criticism, Nuno Santos appears to have missed the strategies being discussed by the government with employers. He has also bypassed the fact that immigrant associations fighting for support in their struggle to see ‘expressions of interest’ reinstated specifically said they could not get it from PS Socialists.
Source material: Lusa
