A National Health Service ‘receipt’ will tell us how much it costs to treat us for free: from A&E visits

A document, whether on paper or in digital form, which informs the patient about the service they have received free of charge and the corresponding fee that was instead paid by the National Health Service and, therefore, by the community as a whole through their taxes. In practice, a sort of detailed receipt setting out how much that service – a diagnostic test, a specialist consultation or a visit to A&E – cost the National Health Service in terms of equipment and staff involved. A way of ensuring transparency and perhaps even encouraging citizens to take responsibility when using the public health service. This new measure is contained in the budget bill, which, in a paragraph of Article 69 – the one providing for new funding allocations for the public health service – outlines this change, which will apply in particular to specialist outpatient services and non-urgent visits to A&E that do not result in hospital admission.

How many times has it happened to anyone – perhaps when visiting A&E due to feeling unwell or following an accident – that they have received treatment and services such as diagnostic tests, including highly complex ones like a CT scan or an MRI, to which may also be added a consultation with a specialist such as a cardiologist or an orthopaedic surgeon? The new provision introduced by the Budget Act is that, when patients leave A&E with their medical report and the results of their diagnostic tests, they will now also receive a sort of receipt (perhaps even in digital form) showing the cost of the service they received either free of charge or subject to the payment of the patient contribution. Many people are familiar with the concept of the ‘ticket’, but few are aware of the actual cost of the healthcare services they receive. The actual costs reimbursed to healthcare facilities are set out in official nomenclatures and fee schedules, but this information is often highly technical and not easily accessible to the public. Hence the idea of helping citizens understand the costs behind the services they receive, not least because the resources available to the National Health Service – a system funded by general taxation – are not inexhaustible.

It is, in particular, the technical report accompanying the budget bill that explains that this provision has been introduced precisely “with a view to promoting transparency regarding the costs borne by the National Health Service (NHS)”, stipulating that, for healthcare services, “provided by public and private healthcare facilities accredited by the NHS, the patient must be issued with a summary document containing information regarding the type of service provided and the relevant fee”. As mentioned, this will be a document, either in paper or digital form, the specifications of which are to be defined by a decree of the Minister of Health in consultation with the State-Regions Conference, This ‘detailed receipt’ will apply in particular to specialist outpatient services and therefore to all consultations and diagnostic tests, as well as non-urgent A&E visits that do not result in hospital admission – and thus all codes except red and orange.