Public health, Italy below the OECD average for health funding

Italian public health is struggling. It highlights it an analysis of the Gimbe, the Italian Group for evidence-based medicine that we have come to know during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the report, which it gives an account of among others the posterthe Italian government’s investment in healthcare has now decreased below the average of the 38 OECD countries. Last year went to health 6.8% of GDP against the 7.1 average of its European neighbors and beyond, given that Australia, Japan, Turkey and New Zealand are also part of the OECD.

According to the think-tank’s numbers all Western European countries exceed the Italian level, with the exception of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Luxembourg which obviously has completely different needs from other large countries and whose few residents live in a European interconnection system not comparable to that of the other “bottom of the class”. Not to mention the average GDP per capita, over 133 thousand euros compared to the Italians’ 35 thousand. Germany and France, for example, exceed 10% of GDP, and Spain also rises above 7%. In fact, Italy brings it to the table 3,255 euros for each citizen, 17% less than the European average and 21% below the OECD average. Germany is close to 7 thousand dollars.

Gimbe underlines how this gap has begun to widen a dozen years ago: until 2010, in fact, the numbers were within the European average. There has therefore been a progressive impoverishment of the allocations of the various executives in the public health system. Even if above all (and despite everything) during the pandemic: since 2019, note Future«Italian public health spending increased by 625 dollars, almost half of the French one ($1,197) and less than half of the German one ($1,540).” As he rightly points out the posterthe graph of this progressive fall «closely resembles that of wages. At similar levels until 2008, in the following years the curves of the various countries took very different paths: public health spending rose constantly everywhere, while the Italian one remained flat”.

«International comparisons – explains the president of Gimbe Nino Cartabellotta – confirm that Italy in Europe precedes only the Eastern countries (excluding the Czech Republic), as well as Spain, Portugal and Greece. And among the G7 countries, of which we will have the presidency in 2024, we are at the rear with gaps that are now unbridgeable.” Our country is indeed 16th for per capita spending between the European members of the OECD and that difference that Cartabellotta talks about is equivalent to 47.6 billion euros. A short-sighted policy, which fails to grasp the value of public health and condemns citizens to endless waiting lists for visits, tests, therapies and interventions which forcibly transform a public system into one where the private sector is the only path, not only for emergencies: «Public health is a priority in which to continuously invest and not a cost to be cut repeatedly» added the president of Gimbe. If no action is taken with the next budget law “it will mean farewell to the constitutional right to health protection”. For the moment, all is silent from the government.

Public health, the doctors’ letter: “Don’t get sick because soon no one will be able to cure you”