2012/07/26 by Stefano Olgiati, Olgiati, Stefano, Alessandro Danovi +1
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Employment and Welfare Studies #FOS: Economics and business #General Finance (q-fin.GN) #Global Health Care Issues #Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life #Health disparities and outcomes #q-fin.GN
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1207.6278
28 pages
arxiv created 2012/07/26 · openalex publication_date 2012/07/26 · arxiv updated 2012/07/27 · openalex created_date 2021/02/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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 σ based on simple partial and absolute differential equations. The sustainability index σ 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.