In the ever-growing list of contradictions, unfulfilled promises and untruths uttered by Carlos Moedas there is one that is a true treatise of shameless impudence. In 2022 he announced the 65+ Health Plan, which would “bring health to the homes of Lisbon residents”, being “a bigger step towards building the Local Social State”, so that “130 thousand Lisbon residents over 65 years of age could have unlimited consultations and teleconsultations when they do not have access to a family doctor”. The first alarm signal came when the opposition led by the Socialist Party realized that Moedas spent more announcing the plan than executing it.
The propaganda machine dominated the narrative for some time. The problem began when it was realized that the plan, after all, was nothing more than a teleconsultation service. But it gets worse: at the beginning of this year, the plan wasn’t even operational because Moedas forgot to renew essential contracts.
It’s hard not to see the irony in this. A project presented as structural, almost foundational of a new municipal approach to Health, suspended due to basic incompetence. We are not talking about a complex reform. We are talking about contracts that had to be renewed. They were not and the few elderly people in our city who adhered to this plan were deprived of access to what had been promised to them.
For months the speech was ambitious. There was talk of access, proximity and response to failures in the national system. But in practice, the plan boils down to a phone line with doctors on the other end. Potentially useful, but far from transformative. And yet, not even this service resisted.
The episode exposes a pattern: politics as narrative, where the announcement is worth more than the execution. Where media impact replaces real impact. And where the absence of scrutiny allows inflated concepts to pass for concrete solutions.
Carlos Moedas built a large part of his image on this logic: clarity of message, simplicity of proposals, strong media presence. But when reality tests this consistency… cracks appear. A “health plan” that disappears due to lack of contract renewal is not a technical lapse. It is a symptom of incompetence and demagoguery that transports us to the worst that populism has brought us.
More than a mistake, it is a portrait of governance in which the marketing political precedes substance. In the end, the “health plan” is similar to a scam: widely advertised, but impossible to find when you look for it.
Deputy to the Assembly of the Republic elected by the PS. President of PS Lisbon
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