During the municipal campaign on Sunday, after meeting with the Administration of the Local Health Unit of Aveiro, Mariana Leitão cited the local hospital as a prime example of mismanagement in the sector and criticized Ana Paula Martins for announcing “ambitious, grand plans that never materialized and did not solve anything at all.”
“I think the minister should reflect on her work and her role, as well as what continues to go wrong,” Mariana Leitão said when questioned by journalists about whether Ana Paula Martins should remain in her position.
In this area, “structural reform is urgent, problems in healthcare are not solved with winter or summer plans,” but by “solving structurally and leveraging all available capacity” in the system, including private sector participation, she asserted.
Health has become a key issue in the municipal campaign due to a system that is failing and not serving the people. “They are completely left to their own devices with the ongoing issues we have been witnessing: closed emergency services, hospitals lacking adequate conditions to receive patients,” Mariana Leitão stated, criticizing delays in the expansion project of the Aveiro hospital.
The current building utilizes several containers for patient services and caters to a population of 350,000 people.
The hospital “has an expansion project whose decision [to proceed] was made in 2022,” still under the PS, and the PSD/CDS executive had already promised it would proceed with the project, but nothing has happened yet.
“We just had a meeting and concluded that construction is optimistically expected to start in 2027, more likely in 2028, not accounting for the construction time,” explained the leader of IL.
Meanwhile, “we have people being attended to in containers,” lacking “the minimum dignity,” she added.
Mariana Leitão recalled that IL has long “presented a concrete proposal to address this issue and make a structural reform of the healthcare system,” by including the private sector, with a “response that utilizes all installed capacity” in the country.
“The minister has been in office since 2024, and the fact is that plan after plan keeps being presented,” but “nothing is resolved,” accused Mariana Leitão, who insists on private participation.
“Are we going to force people to travel 50 kilometers when they could travel 20, just because they must go to a public [health service] and cannot go to the nearby private clinic? Does that make any sense? It doesn’t,” she summarized.
In comments to journalists, the leader of IL did not want to discuss the possibility of an alignment between Chega and PSD during the State Budget discussion but emphasized the need for liberal measures in the document.
“In the end, the Government is free to negotiate with whomever they see fit. That is not a major issue for Iniciativa Liberal,” but what we want to see in the budget are reformist measures because “the country is lagging, it is poor, it does not respond to people’s needs” and “systematically postpones structural solutions to people’s problems,” concluded Mariana Leitão.
