The Report on the State of Health of the Country 2011, presented with great pomp in front of Giorgio Napolitano, may be interesting from an analytical point of view to understand what the Italian situation is, however it is dated. Precisely because it concerns 2011, while we know that many things have happened in the health sector this year. It may be a coincidence, but a few hundred meters as the crow flies from the Ministry of Health, in the Eur, the employees of many Roman hospitals demonstrated just this morning: a protest of forty trade unions under the headquarters of the Region. It will be said: a trade union demonstration does not change the judgment on the general picture. This is not the case, because behind the lack of salary and the announced layoffs of many employees, there is a Health Service which has changed over the last year. Worse. Because beds have been cut, because the times for services have lengthened, because all categories (nurses, doctors, industrialists, researchers, administrators, pharmacists, various employees) argue that this is not the case. Therefore, the photograph taken ("true", according to Balduzzi), of the Italian health care with this Report, appears blurry compared to the problems that the NHS has been dragging on for years.
Let me be clear. If it doesn't work, it's not the fault of the premier - who has resigned - Monti, nor of the Minister of Health Balduzzi: they have inherited a partially catastrophic situation on a regional and national basis. What is happening in Lazio, governed until recently by Polverini, is the result of years of cheerful management by the regional health department. Going up to the North, the financial disaster of the San Raffaele of the late don Verzé, happened before the eyes, lined with I don't know, but of the president Formigoni.
If then that irresponsible man who brought Italy to ruin, and now wants to reappear, tries to charge Monti and the government of technicians with what is happening, go ahead: the Italians, now, have less short memories. And they know who the man is who tried to sink Italy from every point of view and irresponsibly cares about the spread.
Returning to the Report, Balduzzi himself, perhaps realizing that it was dated, in his speech spoke a lot about the current year, that of the crisis. Thus he recalled "the compression of the financial resources of the National Health Service (NHS)". I add that the reduction in funding "has in any case preserved the primary function of the health system of preventing and mitigating the effects of the crisis on the health conditions of the population". This is not entirely true. He said that the National Fund for non-self-sufficiency needs to be revitalized (but who will decide it if the government resigns?), he recalled that the resources are lower than that of the other OECD countries (Italian public health expenditure has grown by just 1.6% per year,
