CALTANISSETTA. The CGIL of Caltanissetta will take to the streets of Palermo on Thursday 20 June for a regional demonstration organized by the CGIL Sicilia together with the categories of the CGIL Public Function and the CGIL Spi to relaunch public health and to claim the right to health still implied and denied by regional politics and a place that looks at healthcare as a place to divide up seats and support electoral clientele.
According to the CGIL “Every year 800,000 Sicilians are forced to give up treatment due to inadequate or non-existent responses in the national health service and due to the high costs of the private sector.
In terms of life expectancy in good health, Sicily is the penultimate Italian region followed by Calabria, with a gap of more than five years of life compared to Trentino and 11 years compared to the autonomous province of Bolzano.
Ours is an area that continues to be penalized by the lack of an efficient hospital network with collapsing hospitals without staff and long waiting lists.
The health conditions of our population – continues the CGIL – especially the elderly (increasing in our province) require local medicine that is closer to the needs of the most fragile people and today this is complicated if not impossible, forcing many elderly people to give up to treatment.
The appointment of general directors supported by current politicians who still think they can pull the wool over citizens’ eyes must give pause to all those who will soon have to go to the polls for the administrative rounds.
The data are disconcerting and give us a very different reality from the one told or promised. But on Thursday in Palermo we will also demonstrate against differentiated autonomy, the measure supported by our Regional Government and which in these days is going to a vote in Montecitorio which will deal the final blow to our already dying national health system
There will be 21 health systems regulated by free market law rather than a National Health Service based on the protection of a constitutional right that looks at people’s healthcare needs; a law breaks Italy – concludes the CGIL – which penalizes the South and will widen the gap between the Regions, making the right to health increasingly unenforceable together with all the other rights enshrined in our Constitutional Charter”.
