The minister, who was talking to journalists in Oeiras in a break from a conference on the future of healthcare in Portugal, said he regretted the fact that there is currently no real debate about the funding of the SNS.
“We shall have an increase in health costs,” he said. “Then they say that it needs to be funded, but no one says how. Well this funding is either made with solidarity as it is today, in general, through taxation, or it is in other ways, that we have refused, or it is made with another kind of funding, namely those that we have floated on an additional tax on the pharmaceutical industry.”
This debate, he said, is “necessary” and the options should be presented to citizens, who must then choose.
In his own view, he added, the SNS “should preferably be funded as it is today ... [with] progressive taxation”.
In his speech to the conference, the minister looked ahead a decade, saying that Portugal’s society will be “older, but with better health indicators”.