Brasilia, Brazil.- With the withdrawal of Cuban professionals from the More Doctors program, 30 million Brazilians will be left without primary medical assistance, former Health Minister Arthur Chioro warned on Monday.
‘Without ironies, I pray a lot that Brazilian doctors occupy the vacancies in the new call; otherwise, we will have lack of care and death,’ the former health official in the government of Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) told TV 247. The head of More Doctors program recognized that there are difficulties in employing doctors in the most peripheral and distant regions of Brazil, which generates a situation of extreme inequality. ‘When we created More Doctors program, as a State policy, we put our finger on the wound in the question of the provision of doctors, which historically was regulated by corporations,’ revealed the professor at the Federal University of Sao Paulo.
The Ministries of Education and Health began to think of a country project to meet social demands, detailed Chioro when denouncing the corporatism present in some medical categories.
He indicated that ‘in the name of market reserve, only two neurosurgeons were trained each year in the state of Rio de Janeiro.’
The former minister recalled that in 2003, when Brazil enjoyed full employment, the Government of Dilma opened a call for the More Doctors program with priority for Brazilian doctors and then it was offered to those from other nationalities.
While Cuban professionals worked in vulnerable corners and regions of Brazil in a palliative manner as established by the program, the Dilma government invested in the expansion of enrollment in medical courses, so that future Brazilian professionals would occupy the vacancies of foreigners, in the coming years.
Chioro recalled that ‘when it was presented, the program guaranteed an emerging 18,268 doctors, scattered throughout the country, who could provide basic care to 60 million Brazilians. It was poor people being treated like never before,’ he stressed.
After five years of cooperation, Cuba decided in the middle of this month not to continue in More Doctors program after the questioning and offensive statements of President-elect Jair Bolsonaro about the stay of the Cuban professionals.
For the academic, the priority of the future Brazilian government in the sanitary area will be the private service to benefit the sharks of the health programs.
‘With the maintenance of the PEC 95 (Proposed Amendment to the Constitution), which freezes public expenditures over a period of 20 years, added to the non-continuation of Cuban doctors (in the More Doctors program), the result will be total malpractice and death,’ said Chioro.