Mario DeFazio
Savona – A cut of another three million euros on pharmaceutical spending. Necessary to balance the accounts ofSavona health company, grappling with the cuts budgeted by the Region of at least ten million euros.
The company led by the general manager Flavio Neirotti continues on the path taken last year: rationalizing spending on medicines to try to prevent the ax from falling on services for citizens. The objective for 2013 – budgeted and recorded in the Company's balance sheet – is to achieve a further saving of three million euros. An impressive figure for two reasons: on the one hand, after the "slimming cure" of the past few years - about 13.5 million euros cut in the two-year period 2011-2012 - it is even more difficult to scrape the bottom of the barrel; on the other hand, the savings estimated for this year in all four local health authorities in Liguria amount, as declared by the regional councilor Claudio Montaldo a few weeks ago, to 5.7 million euros. It means that more than half of the savings of the entire region will be obtained in the province of Savona.
The cut will only affect contracted pharmaceuticals and not the hospital one: in essence, the direct distribution carried out by hospitals and other structures of the Savonese ASL 2 will not be affected but the field of pharmaceuticals prescribed by family doctors or specialists will be affected. The drugs from "red recipes". The pharmaceutical expenditure control structure directed by Marco Bessero intends to move along three guidelines. In the first place, the incentive to prescribe "generics", those drugs which have the same characteristics as branded products but which, once the patents have expired, can be distributed at much lower costs. In this sense, it will be possible to exploit the fact that in recent months the patents of some particularly widespread and expensive drugs have expired, especially antibiotics, antidepressants and those linked to cardiovascular pathologies.
