Alberto Núñez Feijóo has charged, ordered the directors of the public hospital of Torrejón de Ardoz (Madrid) to increase the waiting lists at the cost of performing fewer interventions and rejecting unprofitable patients or processes to increase the economic benefit. “I am glad that he has been dismissed,” stressed the leader of the PP at an event in Don Benito (Badajoz). “These types of demonstrations and behaviors,” Feijóo defended.
The leader of the PP has requested “an audit of that hospital with absolute rigor”, in which “the performance of surgery, tests, the waiting list, and how this hospital has been managed” is analysed, he claimed. Feijóo also suggests that the CEO could have criminal responsibility for the facts revealed. “If there is someone who tries to save money by not caring for patients, there is not only administrative responsibility, but we must see if there is another type of responsibility and be sanctioned.”
A reproach to the PP’s health management model that has resonated in the Senate Justice Commission, in which the Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes, Félix Bolaños, has accused the PP of putting “business before people’s health and lives.” “I’m going to tell you very clearly: the criticisms that the PP makes of the Government of Spain are nonsense compared to the fact that where you govern you put business before the health and lives of the people,” Bolaños said.
They also spoke out this Thursday for the first time about the , which was unleashed after EL PAÍS revealed some audios in which the CEO of the Ribera health group, which manages several public hospitals in Spain, is heard asking to increase the waiting lists to increase the company’s profits in that center.
Lucía García, head of the CCOO health area, that in the autonomous communities in which public hospitals are managed by private companies “there are first-class and second-class patients.” García defends that “some means must be used so that all hospitals are where they need to be.” For their part, UGT says they do not feel surprised by the audios released this Wednesday. “It’s the same as always,” says a source from the union’s health sector. Both unions emphasize that they have been demanding for decades that the public-private health management model disappear.
On Wednesday, EL PAÍS published some audios that correspond to a meeting held on September 25 in which around twenty managers from the Ribera health group and the Torrejón de Ardoz hospital (Madrid), managed by them, were present. In them, the CEO of the company Pablo Gallart is heard demanding that the waiting lists be extended to increase the company’s income and “achieve an EBITDA [beneficios antes de intereses, impuestos, depreciaciones y amortizaciones] four or five million [de euros]”.
