Infinite electoral promises that are broken on two numbers: 1300 days of waiting (with the national health service), zero (paying 7,500 euros). Days and money that separate Mrs. Aurelia from a cholecystectomy surgery al San Raffaele of Milan, perhaps the most famous hospital in Lombardy, the flagship of the San Donato Group, the largest in Italian private healthcare. It seemed like an error, a wait beyond all imagination, that figure which emerged from a live telephone call to “37e2”, the broadcast of Victor Agnoletto are Popular Radio. It is then confirmed by the health facility. The tale resembles others, apart from the counting of days that pulverizes the previous records. “In August 2020 – says the listener – I had the first episode of biliary colic and I went to the San Raffaele Emergency Department, but due to the pandemic in October I am put on the waiting list, without however a precise date, to cholecystectomy surgery. My stones, more than one cm, cannot be dissolved in any way. Since then, every 6 months I have undergone checks, but still no date is scheduled for the intervention. I continue to feel bad, continuous stitches, pains, nausea, vomiting, despite the change in diet. Until in January 2023 I said enough, I can’t take it anymore: I called San Raffaele and asked what stage the waiting list was at, and they told me there was still a long time to wait. So I asked how much was the wait for a paid intervention: I was told orally that there are no paid waiting times and that the cost was 7,500 euros! At that point I stopped because it is not fair that an honest citizen who pays taxes should not have the right to a public health service that works”.
Agnoletto asks the councilor for an account Guido Bertolaso inviting him to intervene in the transmission “but no response has reached us, total silence: we wonder what are the urgent and concrete interventions that the Region is planning to break down these absurd waiting lists, causing enormous inconvenience for the population, given that it was an objective placed at the center of President Fontana’s electoral campaign”. The question draws strength from a fact, which is the confirmation that then arrived from San Raffaele. “The waiting list for cholecystectomy surgery (videolaparocholecystectomy or VLC) is shown in the public tables on the San Raffaele Hospital website and is currently 1300 days. For this specific intervention, as for others, the waiting list is still affected by the delays caused by the pandemic, which has forced the San Raffaele Hospital to stop for several monthsall elective interventions. Cholecystectomy is a non-urgent programmable procedure. The San Raffaele Hospital points out that the waiting list always gives priority to pathologies that are of an emergency/urgency nature”.
In fact, other negative records can be found in the list, such as i 1395 days for a hospitalization for pediatric orthopedics and up to 1700, four years and six monthsfor an intervention prostate laser. But these are numbers to be taken with a grain of salt, because the Region’s booking system indicates where the service is guaranteed first. It is when one expects it from a specific structure, perhaps close to home, that the risk of the Greek Kalends becomes a certainty. And in fact, by law, if the reference Ats do not guarantee the service within the terms indicated on the prescription, the citizen has the right to treatment in a private regime at the cost of the ticket only: and who has ever heard of it? And in fact, the problem is certainly not limited to San Raffaele, which always makes the news and not only on its own merits but also because it still takes place under the “dome of scandal”, that of Lombard politics which makes private health care flourish by desertifying the public one. But if waiting lists are the yardstick, it’s not that things are better elsewhere: for a CT scan of the chest at the Gaetano Pinifor example, you have to wait 243 days against the 60 indicated as the average time, 180 if you go to Buzzi.
The scandal, rather, is then (and still) all political. It is in the deluge of promises that have been felt for decades and still today. On January 24th Attilio Fontana, ie 16 days after the vote, he solemnly pledged in front of the voters: “My first act will be to reduce the waiting lists”. How he hadn’t had five years to do it, or the center-right of which he was still a candidate for 28, over a quarter of a century, because he has governed the Lombardy Region for a long time, where health care is a papier-mâché myth, made of rolls of health lists ‘wait that too Letizia Moratti, former councilor and civic candidate with the Third Pole, promised to dissolve: “My first act? More resources to cut waiting lists”.
But the theme, even the stones know it, is not only about resources but also about efficiency which hangs over the mouths of Lombard politicians. So let’s stay with the lists. Bertolaso, confirmed in the role of health councilor in the new junta, announced in December that the councilor offices were working on a single regional platform that put together all the agendas of all entities, whether they are public or private structures, so that the citizen can access and choose, but also check efforts and results in reducing their expectations. Because, ladies and gentlemen, it seems incredible but in 2023 it’s still not there. The National Agency for Regional Health Services (AGENAS) has structured a database with the waiting lists of the structures, but often leads to non-existent results: among other things, the page of the Niguarda Hospital is missing, one of the largest in Europa, which announces monitoring but does not offer any documents, “the link is currently not registered” warns the “Monzino” page. We are “waiting” for waiting lists.