In 2018, about 539 thousand Italians could not afford some
medical care
and adequate medications because they did not have sufficient income. The number rises staggeringly to 13 million if we talk about people who have decreased their visits, and all of this is documented in the 2018 Report sponsored by the non-profit Banco Farmaceutico Foundation and BFResearch, “Donate to Cure: Health Poverty and Drug Donation.”
The numbers in the report show a disturbing truth: poverty and inequality in Italy are increasing, and they also have an impact on health. The example is that poor families use 2.5 percent of their total spending to receive medical care, compared with 4.5 percent (almost double) for a normal family.
Another disturbing finding is that, having to cut spending on their own medical care, more and more families are using their health care expenditures almost exclusively for the use of medicines, because spending on preventions is being cut drastically. The case of dental services is demonstrative: poor families spend about €30 a year compared to more than €300 for the rest of Italians.
The insistence on saving money at all costs, even on health care, is a habit that is catching on in our country and is confirmed by data from the triennium 2014-16: affluent families have been able to increase their preventive care with checkups and examinations, while poor families have always gone on the cheap, deeming various treatments “not urgent” or “unnecessary.”
Several anomalies have also been recorded regarding the number of deaths, as Gian Carlo Blangiardo says, a demographer at the University of Milan Bicocca and the next president in pectore of Istat: “From the most recent demographic balance sheet released by Istat, there were 649,000 deaths in Italy in 2017, 34,000 more than in 2016. In 2015, there were 50 thousand more deaths than in 2014. In the last century, only during World War II (1941-44) and 1929 were similar peaks recorded.” Finally, Sergio Daniotti spoke, the president of the non-profit Banco Farmaceutico Foundation, who had his say on Italians’ spending on medical care: “There are far too many people who do not have enough income to afford the bare minimum to survive. The data published this year in the Health Poverty Report show that the phenomenon has been substantially consolidated over time and is not expected to decrease significantly in the coming years.”
