Bilbao (EFE).- Thousands of people have demonstrated in Bilbao and Vitoria in defense of public health and Osakidetza and have demanded the resignation of Minister Sagardui.
The demonstrations in the three capitals, in San Sebastián will be at five in the afternoon, are called by the coordinator of citizen platforms in defense of the Public Health of Euskadi, all the unions of Osakidetza and various social movements, such as associations of pensioners, of neighbors, etc.
Several thousand people have participated in Bilbao, with a large representation of pensioners, who have marched from the Sacred Heart to the Arriaga Theater behind the banner with the slogans “Public health in danger. In defense of public health.
In Vitoria, thousands of people have marched behind various banners that read slogans in Basque and Spanish such as “Against the dismantling of Osakidetza” or “Primary Care, the basis of the public health system.”
The attendees, who have toured the most central streets of the city, have chanted slogans such as “Our health is not a business”, “Osasuna gure eskubide” (Health our right) or “Armed robbery private health”, among others .
Osakidetza strategic plan
The spokesman for the convening platforms has demanded from the Basque Government, PNV and PSE-EE a “180 degree turn” of the policy “degradation and the increasing and programmed deterioration that seeks to lose weight in public health to fatten the private one”.
“We demand the resignation of Minister Sagardui because she is responsible for this deterioration and abandonment and for her inability to provide solutions to serious health problems,” he stated.
The citizen platforms consider that Osakidetza’s strategic plan presented this week is an “empty advertising pamphlet, without any concrete measure, a cheap propaganda plan.”
“The counselor talks about humanizing health care but beware, with virtual and deferred care, when it is essential to recover face-to-face care,” criticized the spokesperson.
“As much as Lehendakari Urkullu and the Minister deny it a thousand times – he has warned – investment is also a problem because it is 1,678 million below the average of similar European countries and the budget for 2023 only rises 6%, compared to 8 .5% that the CPI has risen, and, therefore, there is less spending capacity than the previous year”.
Several protesters have carried out a performance in which they have represented dead toilets, at the end of the demonstration in Bilbao “in defense of public health”. EFE/Javier Zorrilla
The conveners have claimed to recover the “full” face-to-face care, with waits of less than two days in Primary Care and health centers “at full activity, one hundred percent.”
Cider replica
The Minister of Health, Gotzone Sagardui, has responded on the Basque Government website to the calling platforms, assuring that “it is not true that there is a dismantling” of Osakidetza, which “is and has been a clear commitment of the Basque Government”.
Sagardui has affirmed that “there is not a single case in which a publicly owned service of the Department of Health has been privatized” and has added that the new ones that are created “are all publicly owned.”
The Minister of Health, Gotzone Sagardui, during the presentation this Monday in Parliament’s committee of the Osakidetza Strategic Plan. EFE / L. Rico
“Never have more resources been invested than now. We have increased the budget by 43% in ten years. We have an investment of 2,114 euros per inhabitant in 2023. The waiting lists have been reduced by 18 days since August and the structural workforce has grown by 2,500 places, 358 of them in Primary Care”, Sagardui has listed.
The spokesperson for Elkarrekin Podemos-IU in Parliament, Miren Gorrotxategi, declared at the Bilbao demonstration that “Osakidetza is being dismantled and it is not a natural or atmospheric issue, it is a matter of public policy.”
“The Basque Government is not managing or planning correctly, it is time for it to focus on protecting health and stop looking at the private interest that some may obtain”, he added.