MADRID, 7 Abr. (EUROPA PRESS)
A human chain of more than 300 people united with sheets and extended white ribbons surrounded the Puerta del Sol in Madrid this Sunday in defense of Public Health, coinciding with the commemoration of the International Day against the Commercialization of Health.
Carrying signs with messages such as ‘Health is not for sale, it is defended’ or ‘We are victims of privatization’ and shouting “cutting in Health is a criminal act”, more than 300 people, as reported by the Government Delegation, They gathered at 12 noon in this central Madrid square.
The rally, called by the Roundtable in Defense of Public Health of Madrid (MEDSAP)-Marea Blanca, has claimed the need to prioritize health, which must be “100% public, universal and of quality.”
The Marea Blanca activist and spokesperson for the association, Carmen Esbrí, has stressed that the objective of the protest is to position health “before the market.” “Healthcare is infected with merchants who traffic in this public service in an obscene manner and with politicians who try to consolidate this mercantilist model,” she denounced.
“Today we demand the defense of a right, that of Public Health, which in recent years has been mistreated. Today’s message is for all ordinary citizens: we cannot let them take away and destroy this right,” he stressed. to Europa Press the spokesperson for Neighbors and Neighbors for the Defense of Public Health, José Luis Yuvero.
Yuvero has attributed this situation, among other factors, to “the lack of professionals, the mistreatment they suffer from public institutions” and the fact that, as he explained, 47% of total Public Health spending “goes private.”
On the other hand, Jesús Fernández, from the Henares Health Platform, has protested in statements to Europa Press about the “elimination of emergency centers.” He has said that, although from high places they assure that everything remains the same, and that they have done “a kind of reconversion” of said service, “it is not true.”
“Four years ago it disappeared in San Fernando de Henares and in many other municipalities, causing reference hospitals to become saturated. That is what happens if you close a care center or do not provide adequate service,” he expressed.
PUBLIC HEALTH, “VAPULEATED”
At the rally, warnings were given about the health situation, “increasingly aggravated by the pandemic” and “beaten by successive crises”, all of this combined with “poor management practices” that lead to “the intolerable increase in health market”, a “destruction” suffered by citizens.
“These managers have decided to ignore the universal human right to Health, although they are obliged to guarantee it without fissures as regulated by norms, laws and constitutions. They are the ones who consider it under criteria foreign to democracy, excessive spending and no investment for progress with the well-being of the people who maintain it and support them,” the organizing institution has alleged.
In this sense, they have warned of the increase in the “aggressiveness” of the intervention of the “speculator market” that affects “with malicious decisions” Primary Care, waiting lists, health exclusion or an “unprecedented increase” in cases of Mental Health.
An action that has “an extra motivation” in view of the upcoming European elections on June 9. As members of the ‘European Network, Our Health is Not for Sale’, the Marea Blanca wants to put on the table “the enormous problems caused by a neoliberal European Commission with zero democratic decisions” and demand that it put its “electoral focus “in the diagnosis” of the health disease, which is none other than the commodification of health.
“We want them to apply themselves to eliminate it with seven key points that we agreed with our European colleagues,” they explained. In detail, it is about “sufficient and targeted financing for the public; prohibition of the health market, universal accessibility; universal access to care; citizen participation, medicines to heal not to earn and professionals with resources.”
“Measures that we take to the rest of the European parties to liquidate this unhealthy and negligent management and change this EU, infected with lobbyists, forcing it to return to the good practices that the European Economic Community, predecessor of the European Union, outlined when setting out on its path in 1957 “, they have settled.
