“We have been wearing down health ministers one after another because the system grinds down any minister. It is such a large and vast system that it cannot rely on decisions made centrally by the Ministry of Health,” said the candidate supported by the Iniciativa Liberal (IL).
In Coimbra, where he participated in an event with university students of Political Science, the European deputy stated that the National Health Service (SNS) must have “internal incentives and mechanisms to continuously control and improve the services provided.”
Regarding the political responsibility of the current officeholder due to successive cases, Cotrim Figueiredo emphasized that “you can call for as many resignations as you want, but in six months, you will be calling for them again because the system will not function.”
“Currently, many people already recognize that there are problems in the SNS. Give me credit because I have been talking about this for six years, and three years ago, I presented a profound, structured reform plan and no one was interested,” he lamented.
Highlighting the need to approach problems with “clarity and courage,” the presidential candidate insisted that the SNS, with 160,000 health professionals and a 17 billion euro budget, “cannot be managed centrally.”
“It must have sufficient incentive and control systems at its base units to operate autonomously; otherwise, it will never function,” Cotrim Figueiredo stressed, noting that if ten years of increased resources are not enough to prove this, then he doesn’t know what is needed.
For the Presidential candidate, “health is the most urgent and pressing example that the lack of structural reforms results in poor public service and a waste of public resources.”
“When problems are postponed, when they are not recognized, and when there is fear to make structural reforms, they become more difficult to resolve. This health problem is particularly grave because we have had people suffering for too many years, literally due to the lack of quality service,” he lamented.
Cotrim Figueiredo argued that a President of the Republic must be “more interventionist, more energetic, and demanding, because the issues cannot be removed from the agenda, and [the country] cannot settle for quick fixes or mere cosmetic operations.”
“The current state of the SNS will never serve, and if it does serve, it will never be efficient enough and will consume excessive taxpayer resources for the quality of the services provided,” he predicted.
The liberal deputy also noted that year after year, the state budget allocation for health has increased “without seeing improvements in health services.”
According to Cotrim Figueiredo, the problem is not financial but rather the system’s architecture, since the funds for the SNS increased by more than 80% between 2015 and 2025.
