Gimbe, NHS in red code between waiting lists and renunciation of treatment – Healthcare

The National Health Service is code red: endless waiting lists, renunciations of care, inaccessible innovations, unprecedented inequalities. And while public health falls back, the private sector advances. This is the analysis of the Gimbe Foundation, according to which “a radical change of course is needed” and a plan to relaunch the NHS.
“The sustainability crisis of the NHS – declares Nino Cartabellotta, Gimbe president – is reaching the point of no return amid the indifference of all governments which in the last 15 years, in addition to cutting or not investing in health care, have been unable to implement courageous reforms to guarantee the right to health protection”. The result is that patients today, he warns, “are experiencing the consequences of a NHS now in code red due to the coexistence of various diseases: massive under-financing, lack of personnel due to lack of investment, lack of planning and growing demotivation, inability to reduce inequalities, obsolete organizational models and the inexorable advance of the private sector. A seriously ill NHS that forces patients to endless waits, medical migration, huge expenses, up to the point of giving up treatment”. According to a recent hearing by Istat, Gimbe underlines, the share of people who have had to give up health services has gone from 6.3% in 2019 to 9.6% in 2020, up to 11.1% in 2021 And if in 2022 the estimates would attest to a recovery with a reduction to 7%, the main obstacle remains the long waiting lists (4.2%) compared to renunciations for economic reasons (3.2%). Furthermore, in 2021, health expenditure in Italy reached 168 billion euros, of which 127 was public expenditure (75.6%), 36.5 (21.8%) was paid by families and 4.5 (2 .7%) supported by health funds and insurance companies. The key to understanding, comments Cartabellotta, “is very clear: politics has gotten rid of a substantial share of public health spending, unloading unfair burdens on household budgets”.
WAs for territorial inequalities, the North-South gap is “by now unbridgeable, and makes the ‘southern question’ in health care a social and economic priority”. In fact, looking at the Lea scores (Essential levels of assistance) in the decade 2010-2019, among the top 10 Regions only two are from the center (Umbria and Marche) and none from the south, and in 2020 only 11 Regions comply with the Lea, which only Puglia in the South.