by Michele Sanfilippo
I live in Turin and I am astonished watching the election campaign both for the European Championships and, in the case of Piedmont, for the Regionals. There is not a party, especially as regards the electoral race for the Regional elections, that does not talk about the healthcare which, moreover, is the most tangible problem for the majority of the population, but especially for the older ones.
Obviously the right defends the healthcare model current, claiming to have rationalized the structures and reduced waiting times for visits; while the left, the Democratic Party in particular, claims that waiting lists require time unacceptable and that, instead, much more money should be invested in healthcare.
I don’t like the fact that the right acts like the right, but it doesn’t surprise me either. Their idea has always been to make sure that the market replaces the State in the various public sectors and especially in healthcare. But I am much more disturbed by the candidate of the Democratic Party, who is part of that wing of the Democratic Party of Renzian extraction (more or less direct) which, for too many years, has looked more at Confindustria and to its market model and the Anglo-Saxon social model that derives from it, rather than to the weakest sections of the population. It disturbs me that he criticizes the management of healthcare without the slightest hint of self-criticism regarding the disastrous policies of the party he belongs to, which has put no brakes on privatization of the National Health Service (SSN), which occurred from the reform of Title V of the Constitution (by the Democratic Party) onwards.
It disturbs me because the problem does not only concern the amount of money that is paid for healthcare, but the way in which this money is used also thanks to the political action (or inaction) of the Democratic Party. Let’s be clear: private individuals have every right to compete with the public, but not enjoy saddles blatant concessions that politics, both on the right and on the left (unfortunately), have prepared over time and which, in fact, have led to an enormous transfusion of public money into private coffers – and consequently have impoverished public healthcare in terms of numbers and quality with outcomes that anyone who has had the misfortune of ending up in an emergency room, for example, has been able to experience first-hand.
Therefore, the problem does not only concern the money that is paid but the general rules with which the NHS is managed and which, in fact, only serve to make it less useful, less criticizable and therefore replaceable from private individuals. It’s a shame, however, that the six million (and growing) people living in poverty, the money for private healthcare they won’t be able to afford it.
Article 32 of the constitution states “The Republic protects health as a fundamental right of the individual and interest of the community, and guarantees free treatment to the indigent.” So, if the left wants to go back to being left it must understand that its task is not only to increase the GDP (which is then not redistributed in an equitable manner) or to increase jobs (paid to the limits of indecency), but to protect the weakest, given that the strongest they know very well how to protect themselvesas they have demonstrated over the last thirty years.
