“The Minister of Health is a very paradigmatic case of incompetence, arrogance, and a wrong vision of the SNS. I would say that if I had to choose one of these three characteristics, the most important is the wrong vision of the SNS,” criticized Mariana Mortágua, speaking to journalists during a visit to a senior university in the municipality of Seixal, Setúbal district.
The leader of the Left Bloc was questioned about the fact that the head of the AD list for Vila Real and current Minister of Health, Ana Paula Martins, had recently objected to “prophets of doom,” accusing them of scaring mothers and using figures about infant mortality for political point-scoring during the electoral campaign.
Reports indicate that the infant mortality rate in Portugal rose by 20% in 2024, in a year marked by the closure of several gynecology and obstetrics emergency services.
Mariana Mortágua refused to draw “premature conclusions” from this increase, considering it a “very serious” issue, and highlighted that there are various factors that could influence these figures, including women becoming mothers later in life.
“It would be a huge responsibility to attribute causes to infant mortality data without knowing exactly what the causes are. We do not want an electoral campaign to become a moment of irresponsible alarmism,” she justified.
Mariana Mortágua, who in the last legislature called for Ana Paula Martins’s resignation on multiple occasions, emphasized that the “different matter” is the conduct of the Minister of Health and the policy of the AD—PSD/CDS-PP coalition in this sector.
The party leader once again accused the PSD of placing “a group of close associates” in hospital administration positions and insisted on the critique that the Social Democrats intend to privatize the SNS.
“And when people realize this and go to a hospital, there won’t be a hospital, there will only be private entities. And we do not want to reach that moment. That is why it is so important to defeat the right and defeat the PSD and their idea of the SNS. They actively want to privatize the SNS. And that is the greatest irresponsibility of Ana Paula Martins on top of all the others that are known,” she concluded.
