Tribunal de Contas Brands Carlos Moedas's Plano Lisboa 65+ 'Redundante e Ineficiente' on 9 June — 15,293 of 130,000 Eligible Seniors Enrolled While Half the Spend Routed to Pareceres, Publicity and Graphic Design

The Tribunal de Contas (Court of Audit) released on Tuesday 9 June 2026 a long-awaited audit of the Plano Lisboa 65+ — the municipal health-and-wellbeing programme Mayor Carlos Moedas launched at the Paços do Concelho on 20 October 2022 to offer free teleconsultações, home medical visits, dentistry, ophthalmology and hospital-bound emergency transport to every Lisbon resident aged 65 or over. The auditors' verdict is two words long: redundant and inefficient. The report finds the programme generated no measurable added value over what the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS, National Health Service) and the existing Misericordia / IPSS network already provide, with “limited execution” across every category and “exceeded objectives” on none.

For the city's foreign residents — particularly those who entered Portugal under the D7 retirement-income visa and reach the 65-plus age band already inside the àmbito of the câmara, but well outside the Portuguese-speaking radius the programme's advertising assumes — the audit is a useful map of where Lisbon's municipal health budget has and has not landed since 2022.

The participation gap: 12 percent

Of the roughly 130,000 Lisbon residents aged 65 or over the câmara identified as eligible, only 15,293 enrolled — about 11.8 percent of the target pool. The Tribunal de Contas treats the headline enrolment figure as the floor for its critique, not the ceiling: actual utilização across services sits dramatically lower.

The audited capacity-use rates the Tribunal reports break down as follows:

• Teleconsultas and visitas domiciliárias: 21 percent
• Saúde oral (dentistry): 11 percent
• Oftalmologia (vision care): 5 percent
• Transporte de urgência (ambulance transfer to hospital): 0 percent

That last figure — zero utilisation of a contracted ambulance line over the audit window — is the cleanest single data point the report produces. It frames the question the opposition is now asking: not whether 65+ Lisbon seniors needed the service, but why so few of them reached it through the câmara's channel.

Half the budget went to lawyers, ads and graphic design

The audit's spending breakdown is what has driven the political reaction. The Tribunal finds that roughly half of total Plano Lisboa 65+ expenditure funded pareceres jurídicos (legal opinions), publicidade (advertising) and design gráfico (graphic design) — a sum that the report flags as comparable to what the programme actually spent on healthcare delivery. The auditors also note the absence of consistent public-accountability mechanisms across the programme's first three years.

The political reading from opposition benches is direct. The Bloco de Esquerda's Lisbon councillor Carolina Serão filed formal accountability requests and told reporters the programme “became an expensive communication policy with poor practical execution”, lacking integration with the SNS. The BE adds that it tabled a proposal in 2022 for direct SNS coordination at the design stage, which the Moedas administration declined. The Partido Socialista has demanded the Mayor appear before the assembleia municipal to explain both the spending mix and what it calls a “mudança de rumo” — a course correction.

What Plano Lisboa 65+ actually offers

Plano Lisboa 65+ was rolled out as a câmara-funded benefit channel sitting alongside the SNS rather than inside it: free 24-hour medical teleconsultas via a contracted call centre, scheduled home visits for limited-mobility cases, basic dental and ophthalmology cycles delivered through external clinics under municipal contract, and a non-emergency ambulance route to the hospital for over-65 residents flagged in the system. Enrolment was opt-in through the câmara's social-action network and the Juntas de Freguesia, with no income test and no SNS doctor's referral required.

The political logic at launch was that Lisbon's denser 65+ population could be reached through a parallel municipal channel faster than waiting for the SNS to expand primary-care capacity in the Lisbon ARS. The Tribunal's finding is essentially that the parallel channel did not in fact reach materially more people than the existing SNS / IPSS network, and absorbed a disproportionate share of its own budget in non-clinical line items.

The October vote frames the timing

The audit lands four months before the autarquicas of 12 October 2026, the next municipal election cycle in which Carlos Moedas will defend Câmara Municipal de Lisboa. Plano Lisboa 65+ was one of the two showcase social policies of his first mandate (the other being the Renda Acessível rent programme), and his communications team used the enrolment headline figure across the 2022-2024 campaign cycle. The Tribunal de Contas finding — coming from an institutional auditor rather than a partisan caucus — reframes those figures as a denominator problem rather than a participation success.

For Lisbon's foreign 65+ residents already weighing whether to renew their utente number through the SNS or rely on the municipal benefit channel for routine care, the audit's practical conclusion is plain: as of June 2026 the SNS route was where the actual care was delivered, and where the bulk of the Plano Lisboa 65+ enrollees ended up turning when they needed it.

What happens next

The Tribunal de Contas does not have the power to suspend the programme, only to publish its findings and forward them to the Assembleia Municipal de Lisboa. The opposition's stated next step is to schedule a câmara hearing on the audit before the summer recess and to push for the Moedas administration to either restructure the programme around explicit SNS integration or wind it down and redirect the envelope. The Mayor's office, contacted by Portuguese media on Tuesday, has not yet issued a formal response to the audit's specific findings.

Sources

• Tribunal de Contas audit publication, 9 June 2026 — via Expresso, Noticias ao Minuto.
• Bloco de Esquerda Lisboa statement, councillor Carolina Serão.
• Câmara Municipal de Lisboa Plano Lisboa 65+ launch communication, 20 October 2022.