Just as expected. The government’s budget package will allocate only a few pennies to the public health service – a pittance that plunges the national health system into an even deeper crisis. Minister Schillaci had asked for nearly eight billion; if all goes well, three hundred and forty million will be allocated, but only half of that will go towards funding regional services. One and a half billion has already been earmarked for pharmaceutical companies and another portion is going towards contract renewals. Everyone is up in arms, but not enough so.
I do not wish to appear as a street agitator, but I am still astonished by the silence of my fellow citizens. And yet. Over the past few months, I have visited many town squares and theatres to present my book, and whenever I read the chapter on healthcare cuts and the real battle we should all be fighting to stop them, there was always thunderous applause. So why are we now standing by the window, simply watching? It’s not as though we’re talking about the Transport Minister’s grandiose projects, or the petty squabbles of this or that undersecretary; we’re talking about health – something that affects us all, healthy and sick alike, without exception.
When they tell you that you’ll have to wait six months or a year for a CT scan, but that if you have it privately there’s a slot available even tomorrow, remember these days, and the faces of the prime minister and her ministers when they told you that the budget package had been drawn up ‘with great composure, common sense and unity, focusing solely on what was best for the public’. Go and look again at the group photo taken whilst they were announcing an interest-rate cut for the self-employed, whilst for the middle class the savings amount to the cost of a coffee a day.
For now, it is our young people who are voicing their anger, beaten by the police even though they are demonstrating peacefully. I wonder, if we, who are a bit older, were to take to the streets to defend the right to healthcare, would they beat us up too? Would they send us to hospital, where there is a shortage of doctors and nurses? That would be quite a catch-22.