Pharmaceutical spending soars again and compliance with the spending ceiling set at 13% by the National Health Fund really seems almost a chimera. According to the latest data released by AIFA last December, expenditure on medicines grew by 9.5% compared to the previous year, and in January 2006 it underwent a staggering rise, increasing by 14.4% compared to January 2005. The fact that the winter flu wave was less than expected did not seem to have helped either. According to the latest provisions of the law, if the calculation of consumption in the month of March does not suffer a slowdown, all the measures envisaged to stem the situation would come into action, above all other price cuts for the pharmaceutical industries, pharmacists and wholesalers. How will these provisions be reconciled with the fact that the last Government, in order to increase the industrial profile of our country, among its last acts established a strategic protocol precisely with the pharmaceutical sector, entrusted to the supervision of AIFA. The result of this act was the allocation of 100 million euros on an annual basis to promote investments in research and development, recognizing a premium of up to 10% of the total investment made in our country by pharmaceutical companies. The key political point of the agreement is that politics "takes medicines as a health asset and, at the same time, a development tool for the country". Spending is not holding up, but industry must still grow on pain of "third worldization" of the country, so the spotlights are all shifting to the consumption side and in particular to their primary indicator. In the meantime, recipes have grown on average by 6.6%, with the maximum peak in Puglia (11.9%) and the minimum in Calabria (11.2%). And even more sensitive were the shopping excursions recorded locally: Abruzzo +28.9%, Puglia +23.6%, Umbria and Sicily +19.1%, Lazio +15.6%, Piedmont +15.1%. If the pharmaceutical industry is a lemon that can no longer be squeezed, the Governors (and the Guardia di Finanza) are once again hard at work to identify and target all phenomena of inappropriateness and undue spending. As unique indicators, however, at the moment, they only consider the income statements that don't add up, broken ceilings and budgets, increasingly empty coffers. The health objectives achieved or not achieved, the conditions (and influences) of the patients, the induced spending, have no place on the blackboard of good and bad. Among the villains more and more frequently we find only general practitioners: on paper the center of the health system, in fact at the center of police investigations.
