The truth hurts” was how a song of the 60s went. Truth really does hurt and that’s why we are drowning in a sea of lies, in all fields and at all levels of society. When often repeated, lies are a perfect means of defending ourselves from uncomfortable truths that assert themselves as real truths (please excuse the pun), counting on the short memory of one’s interlocutors, lies that often reach a paradox. Even in the Health System, things do not change in this sense, nor can they change, even though the Minister, who has extensive experience in the field, can hardly fail to realise the problems involved and where radical intervention is required to ensure the health system starts to work again.

But the wave, the resurgence always exists of lies carefully spread by those who do not want changes, who do not desire real alterations to the system. Lies well created by those responsible for more than one disaster. Over the course of many years, a number of reforms have been implemented, one reform after another with increasingly worse results, in a crescendo worthy of Rossini.

Therefore Prof.Perelli’s article reports on page 36 the outlay figures of the health service and those given by the World Health Organization which place Italy at the second place in the world concerning the quality of the health care. It is certainly a good result. However, we notice that here again the analysis is, as always, based only on the outlay figures whereas a complete analysis should take the income figures under consideration as well. For the past 20 years, we have been asking the appointed institutes exactly what the net figure is paid by the public specifically for state Health expenditure.

We have never managed to find out, not even when we asked the Under-Secretary for Health, Elena Marinucci. Every time it was like banging up against a rubber wall. In order to make a serious and proper calculation, to know just how much the deficit actually is - that is if there is one - we need to know how much comes in and how much goes out, while the Ministry of Health only ever tells us what goes out. To call it a financial statement is something of a euphemism. Professor Sirchia, the real new approach, the real change could begin like this: let’s start making the incoming and outgoing visible to everyone, let’s start producing figures, whether good or bad. We certainly won’t play them on the lottery.