Aragón, Cataluña and Cantabria can't afford to pay their doctors' and nurses' salaries, so they recently had a powpow which, despite the pussyfooting, was an initial attempt to think about reducing costs by sharing resources, as well as about mustering courage to tell health service users that they're going to have to pay quite a lot more via their taxes and at point of access.

Unless an extra central government is to descend from heaven on a cloud, the first bit basically means returning powers to central government. This would have been great news to bond markets concerned about the viability of Spain's constitutional model and about Catalan government insolvency, and might have reduced Catalonia's frightening cost of borrowing.

But, of course, while recentralisation is what one hand desperately wants, the other hand is threatening mayhem unless costly nation-building and flag production at parish pump level is promised--after all, what would be the default language to be used in a common health system?! And so the whole thing was hidden away and talked down.

Fucking madness, no?

Tags (experimental automated caching of WP extracts):

• Aragon (75) Aragon is a modern autonomous community in Spain, coextensive with the medieval Kingdom of Aragon.
• Cantabria (5) Cantabria is a Spanish historical region and autonomous community with Santander as its capital city.
• Catalonia (998)
• Health care (1)
• Separatism (9)
• Spain (1423)

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