"Emphasizing the need to make the National Health Service truly sustainable has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the logic of privatization“. This is the clarification arrived today by the premier Mario Monti, who thus tried to dampen the controversies born of one of his statement from two days ago.
"The future sustainability of health systems, including our national health service of which we are proud - said the Professor -, could not be guaranteed if new ways of financing and organizing services and benefits are not identified". Words that had been interpreted as an allusion to the possibility of at least partially privatizing the health system.
“The right to health and the public organization of services to citizens are one of the indispensable requisites of civil coexistence – Monti clarified today -, an effective guarantee of equality between citizens, an essential principle of our Constitution, of a civilized Italy that sustained". These are "values that must also be preserved for the future, which is possible only by introducing the innovations and adaptations that the situation requires over time".
Finally, not without some resentment, the Premier reiterated “the duty to speak without words becoming a vehicle for misunderstandings and misunderstandings, but to speak about reality. Excellence is also in the public sector, and even the private sector is not always immune from choices not inspired by competence”.
However, it is necessary to remember that the recent stability law includes new cuts in the purchase of goods and services by local health authorities and hospitals, as well as a reduction in the spending ceiling for medical devices. Measures that subtract 600 million from the national health fund in 2013 and one billion since 2014.
According to the governors Italians, gathered today in Rome, the cuts to the health fund put "the budgets of all the Regions at risk of default, with the possible increase in health care costs and tax burden, beyond any logic of efficiency".
For the Regions "it is necessary to return to a level of funding for 2013 of the National Health Fund equal at least to that of the previous year: a further decrease of the Health Fund for 2013 of an absolute value of around 1 billion euro is unacceptable" .
“It should be remembered that this further cut – explains the Conference of the Regions – is added to the interventions of the previous financial ones which recorded a reduction of around 2012 billion euros in the three-year period 2014-32. This situation jeopardizes the possibility of signing a new Pact for Health for the three-year period 2013-2015”.
“The Regions have also presented a series of amendments that do not have additional costs such as those on the subject of depreciation which allow the recovery of investments in healthcare and those aimed at guaranteeing a more balanced management of repayment plans, also for the purpose of improving the management of cash flows”, conclude the Regions.
