“We need health care free of ideology, bias and social engineering and, on the contrary, we know that scientific and technical rigor, loyalty, full collaboration and transparency must prevail. » When Isabel Díaz Ayuso said these words a few months ago, she could not imagine the tsunami of citizen indignation that fell on her after the audios revealed by EL PAÍS this week. Today, Madrilenians know that a hospital which was supposed to treat them with “rigor” and “loyalty” was in reality planning, without “transparency”, how to leave patients stranded in order to make more money.
When Ribera Salud CEO Pablo Gallart demanded that his leaders use “imagination” to improve results, he was referring to ingenious proposals such as reusing single-use medical supplies. We’re not talking about reusing masks, stretchers or things like that that might gross us out: the employees were instructed to reuse some thin tubes that they put in your veins. The imaginative solution was to sterilize these intravenous catheters at home, which can cost 2,000 euros, to use them in the veins of 10 people and not just one. A safe business, but not so safe for patients.
On Friday, the Community of Madrid was quick to point out that “there is no evidence indicating the reuse of single-use health products.” But what EL PAÍS published was that this order had been given, that is, the documentation to which we had access, and not “that it was reused”, as Ayuso manipulated it on Saturday. It might not seem like much to them: the simple idea of making money by risking people’s lives has filled the networks with drinking face emojis. This is ideology in its purest form. The result of a political decision absolutely rotten with ideology: one which puts health at the service of businessmen.
The revelations of this newspaper opened a gap of distrust so difficult to bridge that even Ayuso had to recognize the seriousness of what happened: “Anyone who uses the Madrid Health Service to do any type of business and who puts one life before another will have a forceful and unnuanced response. From now on, the Ayuso media machine will want to talk about the editing of the audios rather than the orders that were given to them. Orders which were ratified after the meeting, as published by this newspaper, which show that the audios were serious.
For three decades we have been wary of this model – of this political decision – which entrusts the management of public hospitals to hands interested in the result: the Alzira model. But the words of the CEO of Ribera Salud tracked in these audios will resonate forever in the collective imagination: these “four or five million” that Ribera Salud needed for the French parent company to sell its most expensive shares. Who will set foot in a hospital with this model without suspecting that instead of a simple catheter, they will put profitability, savings, EBITDA and equity in their veins?
Former Valencian President Carlos Mazón has more pressing issues to deal with at the moment. But with this scandal we remember that in May the agreement was renewed for Ribera Salud to continue managing the Vinalopó University Hospital, in Elche. It is the last with the Alzira model which remains autonomous and in the hands of the company which invented it.
When the political decision was made in 2018 for the public to take back custody of other hospitals alziradosthey found a disaster: equipment to be thrown away, rickety staff, infrastructures so ruined that the Generalitat of Ximo Puig had to invest millions of euros to recover them. Twenty-five years after the system was put in place, what politician today would dare to renew this agreement, after having listened to what is said openly during directors’ meetings?
With this scandal the Alzira model will disappear, which was already showing signs of exhaustion after these companies pressed the public. But others will appear, because the problem with our health is the ideology that underlies it, which consists of using “the imagination” to invent models, stratagems, to put health at the service of the entrepreneurs of the sector and then let them do it until the hospitals collapse or start experimenting on patients to save costs.
Ayuso called for “ideology-free healthcare” while allowing unscrupulous businessmen to parasitize everyone’s health. The problem is Torrejón’s model: putting his ideology, wild capitalism, into our veins.
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