A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #32: From the G7 in Ancona: profit kills health (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translatio

From January 1, 2024, Italy assumed the rotating presidency of the G7 
and from October 9 to 11, 2024, the G7 health meeting took place in 
Ancona: all the governments of the G7 countries, which call themselves 
the "Big Seven" i.e. the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, 
Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as the policies of the European Union 
have embraced the path of privatization and commercial management of 
health, with a progressive defunding of the public health service. ---- 
In the official documents of the Ministry of Health, it is stated that 
the objectives of the G7 countries will be to strengthen prevention and 
promote the interconnection between human, animal and ecosystem health.

In reality, governments around the world are under pressure from 
multinational pharmaceutical companies, interested in imposing a 
prevention model based on the abuse of pharmacological and vaccination 
practices, with which to make huge profits, also taking away from 
individual states the possibility of making independent choices.

These policies have a heavy impact on both access to services and the 
right to care and on the conditions of workers in the sector.

While the "great of the Earth" unilaterally decide on our health in a 
global project of privatization of resources, consolidating a perverse 
mechanism whereby only the rich can get treatment and fueling a social 
divide between citizens, between the north and south of the world, east 
and west (a divide inevitably supported by the winds of war), in Ancona 
movements and associations have not limited themselves to a denunciation 
action but have attempted to lay the foundations for a serious 
discussion on what "right to health" means and how to implement it for 
everyone. 75% of the state of health depends on social determinants such 
as living environment, work, home, education, food...

Poverty and social inequality have a profound impact on the state of 
health and everything that produces disease for profit and speculation 
has an impact on us: harmful production, useless, harmful and expensive 
large-scale works, environmental degradation (for example the suburbs). 
Data from the European Environment Agency shows an increase in premature 
deaths due to pollution: 491,000 per year, at a European level, of which 
84,000 in Italy alone.

The data also tell us that while there has been an increase in average 
life expectancy, the period of healthy life has instead been reduced, 
with the onset of chronic diseases that worsen the quality of life itself.

Even the wars underway in Europe and around the world, with their burden 
of deaths and destruction, have a heavy impact on the ecosystem with the 
burden of pollutants linked to explosions.

The first step towards true prevention is therefore not to reduce the 
concept of prevention to the mere application of pharmacological 
protocols or vaccination campaigns, which are especially effective in 
generating profits for multinational pharmaceutical companies, but to 
fight to improve general living conditions for the protection of health 
in the living environment in the territories and in the workplace, 
against harmful productions and useless and harmful works that damage 
the territory and health, against war as a resolution of international 
conflicts.

The Covid 19 emergency has highlighted the consequences of years of 
"austerity" policies that have led to cuts in public spending in all 
European countries.

So while the Italian health fund has lost 37 billion, while 70,000 beds 
have been lost, emergency rooms have been weakened, health facilities 
and centers have been eliminated, basic medicine and prevention and 
public hygiene activities have been sacrificed, territorial services and 
clinics have been closed or merged, the consumption of individual 
services in the private sector and/or paid for by insurance companies 
has been emphasized, also through the introduction of supplementary 
health care in employment contracts by concerted unions, further fueling 
the social divide.

The greatest disinvestment and the greatest penalization has been 
carried out in the world of work. In fifteen years, 50,000 units have 
been lost, only partially replaced following the hiring freeze, also 
creating a strong work-related hardship due to the progressive aging of 
the staff and the impossibility of accessing retirement due to the 
increase in the retirement age with a job with exhausting and burdensome 
characteristics. There has been much talk about the relaunch of 
healthcare with the Recovery Fund funds: of the 191 billion allocated to 
Italy, only 19 billion will be for healthcare, a far cry from the 37 
billion lost in the last 10 years, but these resources will not be 
allocated to hiring staff who are lacking in all public healthcare 
facilities, because for hiring, the reference is only to the 
availability of the national healthcare fund.

The budget laws have seen a progressive impoverishment of the health 
fund in recent years, while there has been a disproportionate increase 
in military spending and rearmament and support for friendly countries: 
in the latest budget law, health spending in relation to GDP fell to 
6.3% in 2024, falling further compared to 2023 where it was 6.6%; health 
spending that continues to fall, impacting the right and access to care 
for large segments of the population.

But it is not just a problem of the health fund and insufficient 
resources, even if adequate funding would be the first step.

It is also a problem of resource allocation; once again the government 
is planning an increase in funds to be allocated to the private sector 
to reduce waiting lists: a private sector that does business on illness 
and that is increasingly entering the NHS through agreements, 
accreditations, concessions, contracts... A private sector that also 
does business by reducing costs for personnel, for safety, cutting 
rights and salaries for workers in the sector.

For years the policy of progressive outsourcing of services has been 
pursued, first non-health services, such as canteens, maintenance and 
cleaning, then increasingly health services, from territorial and home 
services to mental health services, addictions, the disabled, to the 
point of almost completely delegating the care of the elderly to the 
RSAs: the social health system is already completely privatized in the 
hands of "cooperatives" or rather companies for the business of disabled 
elderly and fragile subjects.

This progressive outsourcing of services has created a huge segment of 
workers in the health and social health sector who risk losing their 
jobs at every change of contract or agreement, who are paid about 30 
percent less than public sector workers, who are classified in a dozen 
different contracts and with rights and regulatory protections that are 
inferior to their colleagues in the public sector. A sector where many 
foreign workers are also employed, who perhaps cannot participate in 
public competitions because they are not citizens, extremely vulnerable 
to blackmail because with the possible loss of their job they also risk 
losing their residence permit. A sector of workers who are mistreated 
and also subject to mistreatment: the continuous attacks on health 
workers bear witness to the war between the poor that governments fuel 
and to which they propose security measures and police interventions as 
a solution.

Staff shortages, unsustainable workloads, low wages, heavy shifts, wage 
differences between workers with the same qualifications but classified 
under a variety of different contracts, make work in the health and 
social health care sector increasingly difficult: a condition that also 
affects the quality of care.

All this was also discussed in Ancona in a city sealed off by the "red 
zones": the counter-summit was the culmination of a process built in 
recent months and in which parts of the trade unions, movements and 
associations committed to the issue of health actively participated.

CUB Sanità Italiana has called for a national strike for all public, 
private, contracted, privatized and affiliated sectors of the category 
on October 11, responding to the appeal of the associations that 
mobilized to build the initiatives related to the counter-G7 in Ancona 
and that culminated with the national demonstration on October 11, 2024.

In the "three days" NoG7 the initiatives were divided and alternated in 
sit-ins (at the CUP against waiting lists, at the consulting rooms in 
defense of 194), in conferences against the health market, in assemblies 
such as the one on DL 1660 up to the final national assembly and the 
demonstration that saw the participation of many trade union and social 
representatives, from the movements for the defense of health in the 
environment, to the committees against waiting lists and for public 
health up to Sanitari per Gaza, to the European network against the 
commercialization of health, to Medicina democratica.

The final assembly has collected the call for the widest possible 
mobilization for the defense of the effective right to care for all, 
taking up the contents and objectives of the National Platform "Which 
health care for which health".

Only the construction of a front that can unite workers and citizens 
will be able to counter the attack on the right to care that has been 
carried out for years by all the governments that have succeeded each other.

In this perspective, the demonstration promoted by the Regional Health 
Environment Health Coordination took place in Florence on Saturday 19 
October, which for some months has promoted an information and 
denunciation campaign on the serious situation of waiting lists and 
hiring. The exhausting times of waiting lists are an incentive to turn 
to private facilities, the scarce resources that the government and also 
the Tuscany Region have allocated to the objective of reducing waiting 
lists are intended to increase the additional activity of those who 
already work in the facilities with already heavy workloads and to 
increase agreements with private facilities: a problem that can only be 
solved with an extraordinary hiring plan. The Florentine demonstration 
saw the participation of committees and social and trade union 
organizations including CUB sanità who, despite the adverse weather, 
organized a demonstration that started from the headquarters of the 
Tuscany Region in via Cavour and ended with an open microphone assembly 
in Piazza San Lorenzo.

These are all the beginnings of a mobilization and a commitment for all 
of us who want to fight against all social inequalities.

Our health is not for sale.

Paola Sabatini

https://umanitanova.org/dal-g7-di-ancona-il-profitto-uccide-la-salute/
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