(Adnkronos Salute) – Red alert for public health. The National Health Service 'drowns' in debt: around 40 billion euros to suppliers. A mountain of money resulting from the purchase of goods and services necessary to make the health system work: from drugs to medical devices, from laundry services to restaurant services. This is what emerges from the latest annual report to Parliament and the Government on the levels and quality of services provided by central and local public administrations to businesses and citizens of the CNEL (National Council for the Economy and Labour), which had taken the 2011 survey of the Court of Auditors on regional finance as a reference.
In the document of the Court of Auditors taken into consideration by the Cnel, payables to suppliers constitute the majority of healthcare debts: almost 69% in 2009 and over 67% in 2010, with increases in 2011 (with the exception of Liguria). "Overall - reports the Cnel report - the debt amounted to 35.5 billion in 2010 of which almost 50% (over 16 billion) belongs to the Regions under commission or subject to plans to reduce the deficit. Specifically, Lazio has debts of 7.5 billion, Campania 6.5 and Sicily 2".
In the light of this picture, "if we assume for 2011 a trend of the debts declared for 2010 by the five Regions that have not yet provided the data for the survey (Lazio, Campania, Sicily, Calabria and Abruzzo), the debt - reads the Report - stands at 37 billion. If instead, more likely, it is estimated that the figure for the five Regions may have grown at the rate recorded in the others, the figure reaches 40 billion". A truly enormous figure, if we consider that the estimate of all debts to public administration suppliers is just over 70 billion. In practice, healthcare debts represent more than 50% of the total liabilities of the PA.
Among medicines and medical devices alone, the latest estimates by Farmindustria and Assobiomedica indicate an outstanding credit threshold of 9 billion euros: 5 billion for electromedical equipment, diagnostic instruments, syringes, gauze, bandages and so on and about 4 billion for drugs.
