The Perugia Federation of the Communist Front expresses its full support and solidarity with the Trade Union Representatives of USL Umbria 2 and with all the health sector workers, who are about to initiate industrial action to denounce a situation that has become unbearable.
The severe shortage of staff, disorganized services, the freeze on open competitive exams, the lack of a vacation plan, the lack of responses on basic rights —such as access to meals and dressing time— are not mere accidents or oversights. They are the direct result of a political and economic model based on the corporatization of public health care, which has turned the right to health into a cost to be cut and the management of health care facilities into accounting operations aimed solely at balancing budgets.
USL Umbria 2 now operates like any private company, ignoring the needs of workers and citizens, abandoning entire communities to neglect, and sacrificing the efficiency of public services in the name of budget containment. But this logic is far from neutral: despite grand promises about eliminating waiting lists in three months, the Proietti administration is following in the footsteps of the failed Tesei administration, effectively becoming complicit in the gradual dismantling of public health care to make more room for private sector intervention.
The plan is clear: make the public health care system inefficient and inaccessible —especially for the most vulnerable— so as to justify the use of private providers under contract, which siphon off public resources without taking on any entrepreneurial risk. The result is a system that burdens citizens three times over: first through taxes, then through co-payments, and finally through out-of-pocket payments to access care services now available within a reasonable time frame only through the private sector.
Health care workers are being exploited and subjected to unbearable workloads; the population is being deprived of a universal, free public service. The only ones benefiting are the bosses of private health care and the political elites that serve them.
In the face of this downward spiral, simply denouncing is not enough. We need to build a radical political and social alternative. An efficient, free, and accessible public health care system for all can only exist if freed from the logic of profit. Corporatization must be abolished, outsourced services brought back in-house, staff stabilized, and a health care model based on people’s needs rather than corporate budgets re-established.
We renew our commitment to stand alongside the workers in struggle, certain that the defense of the right to health and labor dignity requires conflict, mobilization, and organization. We will be in the streets, at assemblies, and at demonstrations to expose the political responsibility of the Umbria Region and to build, together, another kind of health care: public, universal, free, high-quality, and under the control of workers and patients.
Against privatization, for public health care: class struggle, not cooperation!
