"The fury on the problem of pharmaceutical or health care costs is an understatement". «The problem of total healthcare expenditure is linked to the presence of Local Health Authority employees, useless personnel, who have nothing to do with the patient. In the 2011 Report of the State General Accounting Office, the national figure is 15%. Consider that the ASL Ba has estimated a number of four thousand useless employees, who weigh economically, but for politicians, useless personnel carry electoral votes».
03 August 2015 – The Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno
BARI – The doctor Liborio Meliota writes to us about the article, published last Sunday in the «Gazzetta», entitled «Against easy prescriptions it's time to speak up».
"This article - he says - speaks of a number of prescriptions - both pharmaceutical and laboratory tests - which are exuberant, but we do not speak of the quantity of services performed or pharmaceutical expenditure actually made by patients: these are the numbers that need to be search, publish and possibly comment. The number of prescriptions (total) that are successful, giving rise to a service are certainly half of what is said. The prescriptions are an act of the attending physician, but the services have the patients carry them out and are at the discretion: in 50% cases they are not carried out".
"The article - adds Meliota - takes data from the regional SIST (Territorial Health Information System) where doctors send electronically (in spite of themselves) all their prescriptions made in the clinic and this is an abstract number".
«General practitioners very frequently have to transcribe - continues the author of the letter - drug prescriptions or laboratory tests indicated on a white recipe book, after a specialist outpatient or hospital visit. This figure covers a number of induced prescriptions for a 30%. Hospital or outpatient doctors (who are part of the regional health service, SSR) also do not prescribe on a red recipe book and send to the general practitioner because they do not observe the regional regulation 17/2003 and the document on deontological aspects on the prescription of doctors' orders . The attending physician, by transcribing someone else's prescription, commits the crime of false ideology. So thirty percent of the prescriptions are induced, the contracted doctors are not responsible for the pharmaceutical expense ».
According to Meliota, "national pharmaceutical expenditure compared to national health expenditure is a very small percentage of 9% (and therefore also in Puglia it will not differ much from this percentage)". «The problem of total healthcare expenditure is linked – the writer maintains – to the presence of Local Health Authority employees, useless personnel, who have nothing to do with the patient. In the 2011 Report of the State General Accounting Office, the national figure is 15%. Consider that the ASL Ba has estimated a number of four thousand useless employees, who weigh economically, but for politicians, useless personnel carry electoral votes».
«The persistence on the problem of pharmaceutical or health expenditure, if you prefer – insists Meliota – is an understatement. If we have come to exceed the life expectancy of 85 years, one cannot think that these eighty-five year olds are all doing very well. Today, any old man is treated for hypertension, diabetes, osteoarthritis, bronchitis, anxiety, etc. at the same time. which are common chronic diseases. Furthermore, if a patient goes to the doctor, asking for an examination for symptoms that he feels (considered true by the doctor), and that examination is precisely what is needed to settle a diagnosis, why shouldn't the doctor prescribe it?».
“At this point – protests Meliota – if we don't take action on waste, the politicians should say it: shall we do like the Spartans with children born sick and throw the elderly off the cliff who cause them to spend too much? Is it possible that with thirty-five years of contributions I will have a meager pension and whoever spends five years in parliament or in the regional council must take a higher pension than mine?»
