Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2015-03-10-Speech-2-517-000"
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"en.20150310.42.2-517-000"2
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"Madam President, firstly I would like to congratulate the Commission. It was a good conference, Commissioner, and you got the whole world together to tackle the problem, so that in itself was very important.
The lesson I took away was firstly that the crisis is not over. There are still new cases and we have got to stay on the ground and deal with them. Secondly, we need to plan for the future. How can we do that? I have some meetings with the ministers from the affected countries. What they are looking for in the immediate future are some quick wins – to get the children back to school and budget support for the health systems. They want people to feel that life is getting back to normal. Debt relief was another priority so that they have some resources to invest in their own education and health systems. I think that colleagues are perhaps not aware how small the budgets of these countries are. We were told that USD 550 million was the budget for Liberia. That is like a small town in the United Kingdom, the entire annual budget.
But the key lesson for me as well is that we have to invest in health for the long term. You both said this – the Commission and the Council. Last week, Save the Children published a report. That report showed that the cost of the emergency response is greater than the estimated cost of building health services in the three countries concerned. So that should be our lesson. We have got to have a health service that is free at the point of use and accessible. It is a scandal that we ask the poorest in the world to pay for their health services. We should get rid of user fees now. In September we go to New York, we have the sustainable development goals conference, and we have to put universal health care at the top of that agenda."@en1
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