A change to the health law bought in over Christmas states that the unemployed who spend 90 days abroad over the course of a year will lose their health rights.
Now, nobody is quite sure where we’re going with this because:
a)how the devil do you know if someone has spent 90 days out of the country when there are no border controls;
b)all nationals and people with legal residency rights (currently) have the right to automatically renew themselves back onto the system, so all you’d have to do is turn up at the health office and coo “I’m baaaack”.
What we are seeing is an attempt by the central government to divide the standard classes of health care in Spain into two further sub-classes: workers and unemployed.[Adsense-B]
So the workers have “full” health care rights and the unemployed have “granted” health care rights. The unemployed are supposed to request a tarjeta sanitaria sin recursos, which is the same as a full health care card but you have to keep renewing it, and if you find a job, or your partner on whom you are financially dependent is in full time employment, you have the right to switch for a normal tarjeta sanitaria.
It’s similar to pensioners and civil service workers, who have their own health care scheme : most civil service workers, for example, are on public/private health care schemes and don’t access health care through the standard GP system the great unwashed do.
So it looks like another building block in a great pyramid of health care, at which the civil servants continue in their gold plated schemes at the top, employees in the middle and the rest of the world begging for scraps under the table.
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