Campania’s healthcare system can exit its previous debt repayment plan and return to regular management by the Region. TAR agreed with the fight that Governor Vincenzo De Luca has been waging for more than two years and warned the Ministry of Health: they must “immediately” withdraw the Region from the Plan. De Luca spoke of a “tremendous victory,” a “battle won in the interests of our fellow citizens and our families.” The response from the ministry was swift: «The Ministry of Health will immediately appeal to the State Council».
Verdict from Regional Administrative Court This follows a long and violent dispute between the Region and the Government in which, despite the progress made by the region, the recovery plan remains in progress. “We are thinking about prosecuting the government representatives present at the ministry’s table for blackmail – added by the governor himself a few days ago – for the economic damage caused by these officials to the Region. It is also a shameful scandal because Campania is still in the process of returning while other regions are not.”
The Ministry’s no statement, he added today, “has imposed serious sanctions on the health service and its affiliated structures and has been used instrumentally”. In that sentence, the TAR underlines that «The Campania Region has achieved and maintained budgetary balance, while the disputed objection of the Ministry of Health emphasizes the need to also ensure full guarantees of the provision of essential levels of assistance (Lep), noting that some goals have been achieved, for palliative care, birth network and breast care, but not for others that ‘failure to reach the minimum threshold for mammography and colorectal screening as well as serious delays in residential network coverage. for elderly people, which makes Campania the last in Italy on this indicator'”. But any government observations, the sentence continues, do not change the conclusion: The region has «reached the minimum threshold for each macro level» and, therefore, «the appeal must therefore be accepted and the Ministry of Health’s refusal must be overturned». The ministry’s position is opposing and, in a note, notes that it is worth noting that the new LEA Guarantee System “is only part of a more comprehensive system of evaluation of the regions’ Obligations in providing essential assistance to citizens country. And it is to this overall level that Campania still fails to meet important aspects that do not allow us to declare an exit from the recovery plan”. In particular, “the indicators point to the lack of social-health networks, namely the inadequate support for the elderly and the frail, and the criticality of the structure in the oncology screening program”.
«Budget balance, achieved to the detriment of services to citizens – Health continues to underline – cannot be considered sufficient to get out of the crisis. Repayment plan. Precisely because of these shortcomings, 18 months ago the Ministry of Health, before allowing the release of the recovery plan, asked the Campania Region to achieve a series of goals including restoring social and health networks; improve filtering; stabilize and make LEA performance adequate. The Campania region has not yet achieved these goals.” De Luca is waiting for a decision to definitively close the ordeal of the health care system in Campania, which was placed under commissionership in 2009 and stopped in December 2019, but remains in a recovery plan.
“Since 2019 – he recalled a few days ago – we were out of commission, then the recovery plan was extended because of Covid but we are still in it and this is crazy, because for years we had a positive health balance, but because of discrimination we remain in the recovery plan and we have to look for new resources that are around our necks”. And when news of the TAR decision came out, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – in Naples, on stage to close Cirielli’s election campaign – launched an attack on De Luca on the health service: «he put on a show with a Facebook live broadcast to attract people’s attention. He boasted of results on the waiting list” but only provided data on “emergencies” while the rest “Campania continues to have a very long list. We’re all fools in the face of genius, but this is just called a shell game.”
