This Friday, the PP imposed its absolute majority to overthrow the proposal launched by Más Madrid to hold a plenary session dedicated solely and exclusively to nursing homes. The decision, consistent with the veto of a study commission on the same issue in the last legislature, when the conservatives also refused to reactivate the parliamentary investigation that had been opened between 2020 and 2021 into the deaths of the elderly in these institutions, shows until point this issue is choking on the Government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Because there is no greater controversy surrounding the years in power of the Baroness than that of the death of thousands of residents who were unable to access hospitals due to the triage protocols developed by the Administration.
“We are not going to play the game of the left, revisionism, raising a shadow of doubt about the residences, resources that work well,” Carlos Díaz-Pache, the parliamentary spokesperson for the PP, has tried to justify. “We are not going to be participants in rescuing the pain of the pandemic once again, to continue spreading it and with that pain the Madrid left tries to do politics.”
The veto on the transfer of the elderly to hospitals was most intense between March 9 and April 5, 2020 and especially significant between March 16 and 29. As hospitals freed up beds, geriatricians stopped acting as filters and sick residents were readmitted, although this situation varied from one hospital to another. According to an analysis published by EL PAÍS, in the entire first wave (from March to June 2020) 11,389 elderly people living in nursing homes died, of which 8,338 (73%) were not transferred to a hospital.
Those horrifying figures take on a new meaning on Monday, when Carmen Miquel Acosta, an Amnesty International specialist, intervenes in the Assembly and turns them into consequences of political decisions: the pre-pandemic cuts that left public health in its bones and shivering. ; the protocols that decided the referrals; the geriatricians, she says, who acted as “gatekeepers at the hospital.”
And it says: “We document human rights violations […] The supposed medicalization of nursing homes never happened, leaving older people in a very delicate situation, abandoned to their fate. In our research we also documented poor palliative care. Also, a de facto confinement, little information to families, communication difficulties, and death alone.”
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Those words resonate like thunder in the Assembly, where the opposition is not willing to let the thousands of residents' deaths fall into oblivion. Even less so when Díaz Ayuso has entered the fray in these two weeks, and first has justified not transferring the elderly to hospitals because “they were not safe anywhere”; and then he complained that “they are about to accuse us of genocide.” Two sentences that show that this is not a closed wound in the government either, which constantly festers through it, aware as Díaz Ayuso and his advisors are that this is their weak flank, the great blot of their management, the tragic stain that cannot be erased. It takes away and always accompanies him, no matter how terrible the circumstances of those days of 2020 were, with hospitals on the verge of collapse, health workers without means of protection, and the numbers of infected people multiplying every minute.
“They do not want to talk in parliament about a model with cracks that endanger the lives of older people in the Community of Madrid,” lamented Manuela Bergerot, from Más Madrid. “They already overthrew the investigative commission with the help of Vox, they are hiding the minutes and now they are blocking this plenary session,” she recalled. “They take the side of concealment and darkness, they deny it for ideological reasons,” she added. And she has denounced: “Mrs. Ayuso responds with jokes or frivolities to what happened, and the PP prevents any initiative for debate or investigation to protect her as the political person responsible for what happened.”
“A commission of investigation would be good, but they have already knocked it down 40 times,” agreed the leader of the PSOE, Juan Lobato, to justify that his group has registered a study commission on the residences.
Hands stained with blood
But the issue of residences is not the only controversy of the day in the Assembly. First, because the PP calls for an appearance by the Government delegate, Fran Martín, to explain the police device that accompanied this week's tractor-trailers, and which the conservatives consider excessively harsh.
And second, because the representatives of Más Madrid arrive at the meeting of Parliament spokespersons scandalized because a PP deputy, Elisa Vigil, described them as “organized crime” in the plenary session the day before, later defending the origin of the expression with the argument that Carla Antonelli, a deputy from this left-wing party, accused the conservatives of having “blood on their hands” for reforming the region's LGTBI laws.
Bergerot complains about “the partiality” of the president of the Chamber, Enrique Ossorio, when it comes to organizing the debates, in his opinion always in favor of his party, the PP. The former regional vice president, for his part, warns that he will begin to apply the regulations more harshly to try to ensure that the groups maintain decorum, listen to each other, and do not interrupt each other with insults and unacceptable expressions.
But it is not the first time that the spokespersons have faced this issue, nor have they been reprimanded for having so many outspoken deputies. And nothing has ever changed. So what is foreseeable is that the Madrid Assembly will continue as it is: full of shouts, screams and out-of-tone expressions that extinguish any argument.
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