The Court of Auditors' slaps on healthcare
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With a cry of alarm disguised as a technical analysis, Attorney General Silvestri denounces a public health system in systemic suffering. Starting from the waiting lists and the health personnel
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"It is the guarantee of incompressible rights that affects the budget, and not the balance of the budget that conditions its due disbursement". It is not a political voice, nor an ideological petition: it is the warning of the Court of Auditors , in the memory and indictment of the Attorney General Pio Silvestri on the 2024 State Budget. A cry of alarm disguised as a technical analysis, which bluntly denounces a public health system in systemic suffering. The National Health Service, says the Court, remains a "unicum in the world panorama", but "is afflicted by numerous problems" that compromise its fairness and efficiency. Among these, waiting lists are defined unambiguously as "a shameful phenomenon for a civilized country", while health personnel are "sacrificed on the altar of budget deficits".
The picture is dramatic: doctors and nurses flee the public sector, attacked in emergency rooms and attracted by more stable and profitable contracts in the private sector. In the meantime, the regions take refuge in the extensive – and very expensive – use of outsourcing and “tokenists”, with the concrete risk of “a public health system structurally dependent on emergency solutions”. However, the Court does not limit itself to describing the collapse: it indicates the possible way out. Local healthcare – Community Houses, telemedicine, territorial medicine – cannot remain a statement of the PNRR: it must be implemented, and immediately . We must “put the healthcare professional back at the centre”, not only with decent salaries, but with real decision-making roles. The stakes are not just economic. They are ethical, constitutional, democratic. Because, as Silvestri forcefully states, “it is not a civilised country” where prisons are a “tomb of the living and the sick wait for months for an essential service”. Only a truly public health system can fulfill its function of social justice. It takes political courage. It takes vision. And it needs to be done now.
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