The debate on healthcare “cuts” has been going on for months now, with incorrect and misleading statements made by both politicians in government both from opposition politicians. Let’s see what the most updated numbers contained in the Economic and Financial Document (Def), published at the beginning of April by the government, say.
In 2022 Italian healthcare spending he reached 131.7 billion euros, a figure equal to 6.7 percent of GDP. With the two budget laws for 2023 and 2024, the Meloni government increased the money allocated to financing the National Health Service, to which the vast majority of health spending refers. Therefore, in absolute values the financing of the Health Service has increased. However, there are some observations to make.
The first observation: although the government had predicted that health spending would reach 134.7 billion euros in 2023, in reality it’s gone down to 131.1 billion. The decline recorded between 2023 and 2022 is mainly due to two reasons. The first – the “most notable” – is linked to the fact that the costs for the renewal of management staff contracts and agreements for staff affiliated with the National Health Service for the three-year period between 2019 and 2021. Given “their failure to perfect”, we read in the Def, these burdens have been moved to 2024. The second reason why health spending fell in absolute values between 2022 and 2023 concerns a “lesser quantification” of the expenses incurred last year by the Unit for the completion of the vaccination campaign and for the adoption of other measures to combat the pandemic, a body whose name is abbreviated to the acronym “Uccv”. This unit was established with a decree-law in May 2022, during the Draghi government, to respond to “possible worsening” of the Covid-19 pandemic and was then abolished in July 2023. Its place and tasks were taken by the Ministry of Health.
The second observation: it is true that the Meloni government has forecast a decline in health spending in relation to GDP, which will go from 6.4 percent in 2024 to 6.3 percent in 2025 and 2026. But the same forecast it had been done by the Minister of Health of the Draghi government, Roberto Speranza, who is a member of the PD led by Schlein.
The third observation: it is true that in the last two years the financing of the National Health Service has increased in absolute values, but not enough to compensate for the increase in inflation. A sharp increase in inflation is certainly a problem for health spending (and also for other budget items). For example, if healthcare funding is doubled, but at the same time the costs for equipment, salaries, electricity and everything else are also doubled, in the end the real spending on healthcare will remain the same.
Last November, in a parliamentary hearing, the Parliamentary Budget Office however he explained that to correctly evaluate the impact of inflation on healthcare spending, we should have a reliable index of healthcare prices. «In the absence of such a parameter, the application of the change in consumer prices to current healthcare spending in nominal terms (i.e. without considering inflation, ed.) can offer at most an indication of the generic purchasing power of the resources allocated to the Service national health system, but not on the volume of health goods and services that can be provided by the latter”, underlined the Parliamentary Budget Office. In summary: if inflation increases by 5 percent in a year, this does not necessarily mean that the purchasing power of the healthcare system has reduced by this percentage.
