More on healthcare (there’s a slope for sick people…)
So: let's start with the data, which are to the PD what garlic is to vampires (I always remember that Aristotle is to piddini as a crucifix is to vampires). You can find them here . I'll make it clear straight away that in this post (or part of a post, depending on how much hassle it adds) I'm using Eurostat's COFOG (Classification Of the Functions Of Government) database because I'm interested in making some international comparisons. The semi-cultured Piddino is by its intimate nature "indernescional", representing the senile disease of that bourgeois cosmopolitanism which, as is known to left-wing intellectuals, has historically placed itself in contradiction with proletarian internationalism (practical example: proletarian internationalism is always been against the importation of cheap labor or strikebreakers, bourgeois cosmopolitanism has always been animated by a Rousseauian philanthropic inspiration of welcoming towards the "bon sauvage"…). So let's show them some international comparisons. Obviously the need to harmonize the data determines an inadequate timeliness of the information, so what we gain in "indernescial" appeal we lose in adherence to current events: COFOG currently stops at 2022, i.e. the one made by LVI, the best ( the best one ). We will remedy this with the ministry's data, which are partially different (therefore not internationally comparable) but more timely (with the budget law forecasts reaching 2025). I don't know if I can give you this update today, but I'll try.
Here you have the comparison between the absolute levels of nominal spending:
The data that emerges is the divergence between Italy and Germany (France maintains the bar) in the period following the subprime crisis. The explanation is not difficult: austerity policies came from us, from them unexpected help which they did not need: the quantitative easing policies (purchase of public securities) by the ECB followed the so-called capital key , that is, they were proportional to the size of the countries, not of their respective problems, and therefore Germany could finance public spending at substantially negative rates while we went through the ordeal you will remember.
It is useful to keep this "stylized fact" in mind, in particular to remember who cut what, but it is clear that the comparison between absolute values of spending is time consuming, given that it refers to countries of very different sizes.
However, it may be interesting to highlight the dynamics of spending volumes, setting 1995 equal to 100:
Obviously this, which is an index, must be read as an index, in the sense that it informs us about the dynamics of the phenomenon. From 1995 to the subprime crisis in Italy, spending has grown more than the Eurozone average, in some ways, despite efforts to join the single currency. The gap was closing. Then everything stopped (unions and doctors silent).
However, a normalization may be more useful, and I propose two, starting with the most obvious, that with respect to GDP (which is provided directly by COFOG):
Naturally, the data is always the same and therefore tells, in one way or another, the same story, with further nuances that must be underlined. Meanwhile, the percentage of public health spending compared to GDP has been increasing almost everywhere, as a result, I imagine, of the aging population and technological progress, which has provided us with more effective but also more expensive diagnostic tools. Then, it is clear that in 1995 Italy started out very disadvantaged in comparative terms, but the sustained dynamics of its spending allowed it to recover positions, surpassing the German figure in 2005 and remaining glued to the Eurozone average until 2012. Afterwards, as is obvious to you, the situation deteriorates rapidly, with a reversal towards the end, due to COVID, and a sharp decline (due to a more vigorous expansion of nominal GDP than in other countries). Here too, when and who caused the problem seems clear to me.
I also propose another normalization, which I don't know why is never discussed in public: that with respect to the number of inhabitants. Because in fact it's not the GDP that gets sick, as our friend Quirino Biscaro says: it's the people, so maybe it's useful to see how much money the State puts in each person, right? You see it here:
Please note: COFOG does not provide this statistic, so I took the population data from the IMF's World Economic Outlook. What do we see in this graph? That, as before, in the mid-1990s Italy started at a disadvantage in terms of nominal expenditure per capita (an indicator which however must also be taken with a pinch of salt, given that prices in Italy, France and Germany are not the same: but data at international purchasing power parity we do not have any). After which, by virtue of the dynamics that I have highlighted, Italy recovers and aligns itself with Germany, the Earthly Paradise of the piddini (and in fact, if it didn't sound like a deportation – which is contrary to my ethical principles – I would send them everyone to stay there…). After that comes the subprime crisis etc.
To avoid misunderstandings such as those raised by the comedian "Il Comico", it seems sufficiently obvious to me that the Meloni Government has nothing to do with all this stuff from an ideological point of view (I am now a majority parliamentarian, but that the PD was butchering the country was factual and I had announced it when I was a far-left intellectual) nor from a chronological point of view (the Meloni Government arrives at the end of 2022, i.e. corresponding to the last data represented in this graph). These graphs therefore describe the situation before the arrival of the current Government: a very eloquent situation which should lead to prudence, if not silence, those who realize only today, for evidently tactical reasons, that something is not right in healthcare. What does not return and when (and therefore whose responsibility) is sufficiently obvious from reading the graphs.
To see how things are going now, however, we must give up international comparisons and return to the Italian data, deepening the analysis already carried out here.
But we'll do this on another occasion: we have enough material for today!
(… I wrote in a hurry and without glasses: if there are typos, put them in the comments and then I'll remove them. Rereading is good for spelling but bad for your health, and I have to mediate between these two needs …)
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2024/11/ancora-sulla-sanita-pe-malati-ce-la.html on Fri, 22 Nov 2024 11:27:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.