Years ago, as a parliamentary aide, when the Left Bloc had only three members, spent some time around a law that dentistry be integrated into the National Health Service. The law provided for a phased implementation. The ideal is that instead of a law was a government policy. But the rules leave the parliamentary opposition there is little room for the legislature.
The project was very conservative, since, with some injustice, did not include dentists in the hospital for a medical career does not add up all the predictable resistance and fierce opposition from doctors. He thought that was the way to open a door and then would be much easier to go further. It was possible for the law and try to pass, when applied, overcoming resistance to go.
It was very educational to see the result. The Portuguese Communist Party did not like because of the issue of career. The other parties even less and can not be said that they have taken the trouble to draw big argument. And see why. The media was not in the room.
There was no power grid stability in any election of a vice-president of a bench and in any place for the journalists was only one. The other went on a run unleashed through the corridors because of a matter that two days later it had not been in the memory of any of them. What there was struggling, however, affected millions of people. But it was irrelevant before a small cock fighting a parliamentary seat. Most journalists, I realized in later conversations, nor had any awareness of the importance of the issue, it found, at first sight, rather esoteric.
The discussion of the project was cleared in an hour. Was disapproved because it would be prohibitive ensure the most basic rights of health.
The Dental Association (OMD), which originally helped to design a project that was technically difficult, is now against the government when it beckoned with the promise of more contracts between the public and private. Now I read amazed that this president has met several times with me and that at the last minute turned his back to the entry of dentistry in the National Health Service (SNS) to complain that "while there is no dentists in health centers or delivery systems, people will be excluded from the oral health "(Público). He dropped the first for the second (and more attractive to dentists already installed in their offices and without raising the question of the status-fated career in hospital), was no and now repeat what I heard then but that did not lead to the end . Hopefully this is, but this I am actually listening to one foot behind. Because at that time only the students of dentistry moved and appeared today in the stands, stunned before the lack of members, the media and their future colleagues. The Order was trying to sign a deal between the offices of its members and the state. Dentists in hundreds of health? I sure did not want.
At the end of last week I read in Público what I knew then and was even the main argument for the project: "around half of its population is unable to pay for a dental consultation." A large part of the Portuguese simply is a life without going to the dentist. We have the worst oral health in Europe, unlike what happens in most other areas of medicine. The numbers are worthy of the Third World. And the reason is just this, as well as the João Rodrigues: There is the National Health Service and, as you must not understand João Miranda, the private course does not guarantee the welfare of the majority population. Especially in poor countries.
And there's dentistry in the National Health Service because the parliament refuses to represent those who elected them, the political journalists live submerged in the foam of day and are completely insensitive to the social reality of the country in which they live and corporations represent only their senior professionals. As I said, this was my very educational experience.
DANIEL OLIVEIRA, September 24, 2007
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