2023-04-18 06:41:46
Assisted procreation, hadrontherapy and gene profiling for tumours, medical genetics, titanium prostheses and “electric” limbs, vocal communicators, updated and innovative aids for the disabled. These are just some of the innovations introduced by the new tariff nomenclatures of outpatient specialist and prosthetics which citizens will finally be able to use, with the green light – following 5 years of waiting – to the “tariffs” decree which implements the essential levels of assistance launched way back in 2017. Those “Lea” that the National Health Service is required to provide to everyone free of charge or upon payment of a ticket.
A game worth over 400 million
A game that is worth a total of over 400 million euros and which has run aground in the tug of war between the Regions and the Government on the resources front, further aggravated by the pandemic. The rights to treatment and assistance ended in the middle and today we can no longer wait: until the rates are officially launched at a national level, treatments and services will remain on paper, except for the “lucky” who live in Regions where it has already been decided to disburse them in the form of “extra-Lea”.
Schillaci’s “last call”.
Today we should be at a turning point for everyone: the new tariffs on specialist outpatients (stationary in 1996) will start next January while those on prosthetics (dated 1999) will have to wait until April 2024. This is what the latest text just sent by the Minister of Health Orazio Schillaci to the Regions, with the request for inclusion in the Agenda of the State-Regions Conference of 19 April. A request that has the flavor of a “last call”: following which the Government might choose to proceed unilaterally with the approval of the Lea tariffs, as it has already done, faced with the impasse of the Regions, for the decree reorganizing territorial care according to Pnrr .
The intervention of the President of the Consulta
Over the years the appeals, letters to the ministry, mobilizations and requests from associations and parliamentarians for the go-ahead for the new Lea who were aging in the meantime have become stringent. But the latest and most authoritative shoulder to the resistance of the most riotous health councilors, who even in recent days had blocked the process towards the Agreement on the decree updating the tariffs in the Conference-State Regions, came from none other than the President of the Court Constitutional Silvana Sciarra. “The political bodies are urged to update the Lea – thunders the Supreme Court in the Annual Activity Report of April 13 – in order to avoid the obsolescence of treatments and guarantee equal access to the best services on the national territory”. The Consultation’s intervention comes – it must be said – following months of intense restarting of the works with assiduous technical tables between the ministry and the Regions to bring the latest filings to the “monster” system of over 3 thousand services (2,108 for outpatient specialist and 1,063 for prosthetics).
Care updates
Many treatments have been “leafed out”, eliminated according to a foreseen “delisting” procedure, updated or reclassified, for example with the passage of surgical services from the day hospital rate (more expensive) to the cheaper outpatient rate and above all, thanks to the innovation, now more appropriate. The text received one last acceleration before Easter, it has been revised and corrected for the umpteenth time and also thanks to the warning of the Constitutional Court we should be at the final stages. And the timing that is finally certain but spread over time might help: from now to January and April 2024 the Budget law is involved: “This might be the parachute – comments Tonino Aceti, president of Salutequità which is one of the associations that more were spent on unlocking the Lea – with which to foresee the finalization of a further quota within the National Health Fund at the end of the year. Not to mention that a decree for further updating of the Lea should already be ready, for which former minister Speranza had allocated 200 million a year starting from 2022. In any case, it is good that we are working to “close”: we need to overcome the latest perplexities to target the new Lea and follow up on the warning of the Council which interpreted article 32 of the Constitution in the most authentic and profound way”.
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