Integrated welfare requires courageous choices and overcoming public-private dualism
Reasoning about complementary healthcare means reasoning about complementary social security but also about assistance and the resources that can be diverted in this direction by adopting an integrated system that avoids 'wild' drifts as happened in Sweden
3' min read
Key points
3' min read
The subject of complementary and integrated welfare - i.e. healthcare, social security, corporate welfare, long-term care, non-self-sufficiency - is a strategic issue, especially in a historical phase characterised by global changes. We are immersed in uncertainty and we are faced with sudden, complex and unprecedented changes that require not ordinary but visionary reflections: a rather slow economic growth, the demographic issue and, as a consequence, the effectiveness and sustainability of welfare systems.
On this front we need to make choices in the furrow of overcoming the conflict between public and private welfare systems and find the reasons for an alliance that has clearly delineated boundaries, starting from the preservation of public welfare, which for us remains the fundamental lintel of the whole system. Not least because the death of public welfare would mean the impossibility of proceeding with private welfare, whether of a family or contractual nature.
Complexity Account
.In the time of connections and synergies, we also need to tune our ideas and proposals to complexity. Therefore, reasoning about complementary healthcare means reasoning about complementary social security, but also about assistance and the resources that can be diverted in this direction overall, in the public and private sectors: that is, adopting an integrated system.
The example of Sweden, which has gone from being a model of an efficient and pioneering welfare state to the realm of unbridled privatisation, should definitely be avoided.
In order to avert this hypothesis, legislation is undoubtedly needed to regulate the complementary healthcare system with a framework intervention that is the result of discussions with the actors in the system and that touches on the fundamental knots, starting with financial subtenability. In the same way as, at the beginning of the 1990s, the complementary pension system was regulated, which gave rise, at the end of the decade, to the large contractual funds, however very different the operating rules of the two systems are.
