The financial framework of the sustainability of health universal coverage in Italy. A quantitative financial model for the assessment of the italian stability and reform program of public health financing

TL;DR

This paper develops a simple quantitative index to assess the sustainability of Italy's universal health coverage amidst financial crises and reform programs, highlighting risks of unsustainability if economic growth falters.

Contribution

It introduces a novel synthetic sustainability index based on differential equations to evaluate health financing stability during economic reforms.

Findings

The index indicates potential unsustainability if GDP growth remains insufficient.

Italy's reform program risks failure without economic growth support.

Immediate intervention is necessary to prevent health coverage collapse.

Abstract

Italy and the Eurozone are heading in the year 2012 into a financial depression of unprecedented magnitude, with a forthcoming multitude of often contradictory public economic and financial stability emergency interventions whose ultimate endogenous and exogenous effects on public and private health spending and on the sustainability of universal coverage are difficult to predict ex ante. The research question is to assess whether it is possible to synthesise into a single and simple quantitative index such multitude of public economic and financial stability interventions and assess their magnitude and direction towards increasing or decreasing sustainability of publicly funded health care and universal coverage. We have analyzed the Italian Economic and Stability Reform Program 2011-2014 and we have proposed a quantitative synthetic sustainability index {\sigma} based on simple partial and absolute differential equations. The sustainability index {\sigma} highlights that in case the growth of the GDP in the period 2011-2014 be insufficient - as is already the case in the first semester of 2012 - all the assumptions on which the Italian Economic and Stability Reform Program 2011-2014 rests will fall, and Universal Coverage will become unsustainable. Health and Public Health professionals should intervene immediately with Italian and Eurozone national budgets planners and financial health regulators before unselective exogenously induced health financing and provision shortages produce irreparable epidemiological effects.