The People's Campaign against Health Care Counter-Reforms in Spain

Since 1996, when the conservative Partido Popular was elected in Spain, it has attempted to weaken and dismantle the national health service. It has focused on three areas: privatization of health facilities and services, increasing patient copayments and decreasing publicly financed benefits, and increasing the role of private insurance in health coverage and care. A major role in this neoliberal strategy has been the creation in one of the regions of "Fundaciones," independent substitutes for NHS facilities and services, which are essentially copies of the "Trusts" developed by the Conservative government in the U.K. The paper describes the development of a broad people's movement which campaigned successfully to combat the "Fundaciones"; these were returned to the regional public sector, and the conservative government in Madrid announced they would abandon their previous principal policy of transforming public hospitals into "Fundaciones."