Rui Rio expresses concern about the degradation of health in Portugal, especially the care provided to non-covid patients.

The President of the PSD denounces what is happening in consultations and surgeries, which accumulate delays and waiting lists, the operation of health centers and even the worsening of mortality rates not covid. Between March and August of this year, there was an accumulated drop of 33% in the number of surgeries performed. According to a study presented in the Order of Physicians, 692,000 Portuguese did not perform medical consultations that were scheduled by the public system. In turn, the number of consultations in the hospital environment decreased by 17%. Hospital activity thus remains below 2019 in these pandemic months. It is these figures that lead Rui Rio to fear that the problems could be accentuated in the coming months, if the Government does not organize the National Health Service in any other way. "The National Health Service is totally focused on the issue of covid and has been sloppy everything else. (...) I cannot understand how the Ministry of Health watches this passively and how the Government as a whole and the Prime Minister in particular assist a Ministry of Health that does not react to these situations," he said. The President of the PSD, who received, this Wednesday, the Portuguese Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry (APIFARMA), in a meeting dedicated to the theme "resumption of health care activity", expects the correction of these "very serious failures" that are harming the health care of users. "When things are serious I also have an obligation to use the credibility I may have acquired from not being bad at everything and anything else, to say bad when it's really bad," he said. Portugal has to reduce its public debt, or at least the weight in GDP"Asked about the broad lines of the Recovery and Resilience Plan, Rui Rio argues that, in a medium and long-term strategy, "Portugal has to reduce its public debt, or at least the weight in GDP". "In the short term, this debt reduction is absolutely impossible. The Government says it will not use the debt component because we have a very high debt, both situations may be defensible," he said, adding that the use of "some part of the debt component" may be acceptable, as it has "very low" rates and a payment period of "many years." The President of the PSD reaffirms that what "is vital is the support to exporting companies and investment, the public sector is still very important too, but the allocation that the Government has for this sector is very large in the funds of immediate support". The psd's economic recovery plan for the country will be presented in the coming days.