The latest statistical yearbook of the National Health Service “documents” the strong expansion of accredited private healthcare facilities, i.e. reimbursed with public money “. In 2021 there are 995 accredited hospitals, a number that has almost doubled in 10 years compared to 525 in 2011. The Gimbe Foundation denounced it during the 15th National Conference underway today in Bologna, from which comes the appeal to “stem the uncontrolled expansion of the accredited private sector”.
Between 2011 and 2021, Gimbe explains, private specialist outpatient facilities also increased, going from 5,587 to 8,778 (i.e. from 58.9% to 60.4% of the total). In the same period, those assigned to residential assistance or Rsa increased from 4,884 to 7,984 (from 76.5% to 84%) and those assigned to semi-residential assistance increased from 1,712 to 3,005 (from 63.5% to 71.3%). Finally, the private rehabilitation facilities increased from 746 to 1,154 (from 75.1% to 78.2%).
Among the 14 points of the Relaunch Plan presented by Gimbe, explains the president Nino Cartabellotta, there is also that of better regulating public-private integration, through two ways: “regulating the profession, in order to reduce the inequalities of access to health services and curb the uncontrolled expansion of accredited private healthcare”, but also “reorder the legislation on healthcare funds, which have become a real ‘Trojan horse’, which diverts public resources from tax exemption to insurance and accredited private healthcare of health care funds.
The aim, concludes Cartabellotta, should be “to make them exclusively supplementary to what is already included in the essential levels of assistance, curbing inequalities, privatisation, erosion of public resources and consumerist tendencies”.
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