For a Public, Universal, and High-Quality Healthcare Service!
In this land of Calabria, people die because public healthcare has been dismantled.
Italy has one of the lowest healthcare expenditures in Europe. The Italian public service spends almost 900 euros less per capita compared to the OECD average. An enormous amount!
Constant privatization; 4.5 million citizens who forgo treatment for economic reasons; doctors and nurses are fleeing from the public sector and from Italy due to low wages and terrible working conditions. The staff is humiliated in their professionalism due to continuous outsourcing of activities and a lack of contract renewals for three years. The choices made with this year’s budget law by the Meloni government and the cuts made by all governments, both center-left and center-right, over the past 30 years, are bringing an end to what many experts considered the best healthcare system in the world.
The right to health, won during the great student and worker struggles of the last century, ceases to exist!
All the data on Italian public healthcare shows its destruction in favor of the private sector. In 2025, as foreseen by a bill from the Meloni government, the spending limit for purchasing healthcare services from accredited private entities will be further increased by 0.5%, and by 1% starting in 2026. In 2024, healthcare spending for private facilities amounted to 40 billion euros, 30% of the total funding for the National Health Service, and Calabria occupies the highest positions in the ranking.
In this dramatic context, Calabria remains increasingly relegated to the lowest positions for the quality of its healthcare offering, unfortunately confirming the disaster inflicted upon the citizens by both the center-right and the center-left governments.
We briefly list these dramatic figures:
- Compared to a national average of 2,140 euros per capita, the lowest current spending is recorded in Calabria (1,748 euros);
- The lowest figure, with 315.9 hospital beds per 100,000 inhabitants, while for the number of beds in the private sector, Calabria, along with Lazio and the Autonomous Province of Trento, ranks highest;
- The infant mortality rate in the South is double that of the North. In fact, it is 1.8 deaths per 1,000 live births in Tuscany, while it is more than double in Calabria (3.9);
- Life expectancy is about 1.3 years lower compared to Central and North-Western Italy, and 1.5 years lower compared to the North-East;
- Biblical waiting lists for any type of healthcare service, with Calabria ranking first for waiting time;
- “Journeys of hope” in 2023 cost Calabria nearly 300 million euros (an increase of at least 5% per year over the past 4 years), forcing thousands of citizens to move to other regions to receive adequate care; for at least three decades, for many pathologies, Calabrian hospitals have been unable to guarantee patients the urgent care they need, not only the proper treatments but even the correct diagnoses.
The creeping privatization does not stop here. The chronic shortage of staff, the lack of investment in public services, and the obsolescence of equipment are not accidental; they are the result of a political plan designed to make the public healthcare system inefficient, thereby encouraging the entry of private entities into high-profit sectors, while increasing chaos in emergency rooms and urgent care departments, with the 118 emergency service forced to operate without sufficient doctors and nursing staff.
In Calabria, regarding the shortage of staff, which amounts to about 5,000 units, President Occhiuto has preferred to rely on the method of calculating staffing needs and hiring plans, the so-called “AGENAS method”. Essentially, this method is governed by an algorithm that determines a downward estimate of staffing needs, undermining any form of revitalization of the National Health Service. An algorithm that represents yet another farce to conceal the constraints of public finance compatibility. In fact, the data feeding the algorithm is the infamous Ministerial Decree
70 of 2015, notoriously known as the Balduzzi Decree, which led to the elimination of around 50,000 hospital beds, the closure of 150 hospitals, and a decrease of about two and a half million hospitalizations in Italy.
Last July, President Occhiuto boasted about hiring 2,115 units for the Regional Health Service and over 5,500 in three years, sufficient to cover turnover.
We are on the brink of the collapse of all territorial healthcare facilities due to the shortage of doctors, such as general practitioners, on-call doctors, and pediatricians.
In 2010, let us remember, Scopelliti, the President of the Regional Government, closed 18 hospitals, and Roberto Occhiuto, the current President of the Regional Government, argued that maintaining more hospital beds and 18 hospitals throughout the region was a waste! It was a waste to recognize the right of Calabrians to receive treatment in public facilities…!!! Those who followed, including the center-left Presidents, did not reopen what was closed.
The choices made by the center-right in our region worsen the disastrous reality of our hospitals and territorial healthcare facilities.
We want to assert, with equal clarity, that it is no longer sufficient to defend individual hospital facilities, because there is now a significant portion of the Italian population, and even more so the Calabrian population, that gives up seeking treatment because the public service no longer guarantees free care, and the private sector charges high fees for services.
We must defeat this capitalist logic, which treats a public service as if it were a private business, and relaunch healthcare as a public and common good, cutting-edge, adequately funded, and removed from the speculative appetites of private entities, because it is not only necessary but also realistically achievable.
Below are some of our proposals:
- Increase healthcare spending, setting a target of 10% of GDP to ensure a public, universal, and high-quality healthcare service;
- An extraordinary hiring plan to ensure the achievement of a fully public National Health Service;
- Improve working conditions for healthcare personnel by reducing working hours to 30 hours per week with the same salary, and recognizing the nature of strenuous work for certain specializations;
- Eliminate the figure of NHS workers not directly hired by the NHS, particularly the so-called “on-call” doctors and nurses. This mechanism burdens public finances and negatively affects patient health;
- Gradually transfer facilities and personnel of both accredited and non-accredited private healthcare services to the public sector;
- Abolish co-payments, increase the number of drugs in category A (including contraceptives);
- Repeal the regionalization and corporatization of the National Health Service, restoring a unified, public, and centralized healthcare system to ensure equity and quality of services across the national territory and enable the rational planning of resource distribution;
- Rethink the financing model for healthcare, moving beyond mere demographic criteria and considering specific territorial needs, starting with historically underserved areas;
- Overcome the hospital-centric model and move toward a proximity-based healthcare model with a widespread network of territorial facilities for every 10,000 people;
- Strengthen home care services to guarantee treatments closer to people and better meet the needs of communities;
- Promote prevention as a fundamental tool and practice for population well-being;
- Increase the number of hospital beds to at least 6 per 1,000 inhabitants (compared to the 5 guaranteed in 1996). This objective requires the immediate construction of new hospitals, an extraordinary renovation plan for existing facilities, including unused ones, along with the reopening of previously closed hospital structures, with guaranteed financial resources, which, contrary to what Occhiuto claims, are currently nonexistent;
- Increase the total number of family planning clinics and related multidisciplinary teams to ensure health, assistance, and full functionality, as provided by the NHS;
- Increase spending on mental health care;
- Include ophthalmology and dental services in the Essential Levels of Assistance (LEA);
- Reintroduce exclusive employment with the NHS for all dependent personnel, abolishing private practice within public facilities;
- End the disastrous government-imposed management of Calabrian healthcare and cancel the debt accumulated over the years, which has ballooned due to failed government administrations and private speculation. Everything must return to the hands of the Calabrian people, who must be empowered to participate in decisions and choices.
With these positions and proposals, we will participate in the demonstration on May 10 in Catanzaro.
Fronte Comunista Calabria
Potere al Popolo Calabria
Movimento per la Rinascita Comunista Calabria
USB Sanità Calabria
Partito Comunista Italiano Calabria
