De Luca against Rome: for the governor, Campania's healthcare system should no longer be 'commissariate'.

It had announced it and it did it. In order to say no more to discrimination on the skin of Campania, the Region has gone to the sticky papers and will take to court the Ministry of Health, which has not closed the chapter on the health debt recovery plan. For now, the appeal is addressed to the TAR (Regional Administrative Court), but criminal action against ministerial managers is also being considered. Meanwhile, for what he has always described as "an act of political delinquency", the governor, Vincenzo De Luca, announces that he has notified the appeal with which he is turning to the administrative court to oppose the decision of 4 August, and he does so in the hope that the Tar "will apply the law of the State instead of making absolutely shameful political retaliations" and thus do what "the Ministry of Health did not do".

The negative response from the ministry led by Orazio Schillaci is "a shameful act of discrimination," De Luca reiterates, explaining why: "Campania is the region that has had a surplus health budget for 13 years, along with four others, but Campania is the one that has the best residual surplus in the ordinary budget. "Lombardy has an accumulated residual of a few billion euros to confirm the fact that it has had resources that were also not necessary for the maintenance of that system," says De Luca, who admits "some suffering in prevention" but emphasises that "despite the fact that the Campania health service has achieved its objectives in hospital medicine, territorial medicine, and also home medicine, as far as the overall objectives of the three areas are concerned, we are completely compliant.

In the appeal, therefore, the illegitimacy of the denial of the exit from the health deficit recovery plan is contested, not only for the structurally balanced accounts since 2013, but also for the attainment of the guarantee levels in the provision of the Essential Levels of Care (Livelli Essenziali di Assistenza - LEA). In fact, many in Campania had believed in the possibility of a positive response from Rome, because in July the time seemed to have come to exit the recovery plan, after the Ministry of the Economy had recognised an improvement in the administration's budget. Then, the stop came from the Ministry of Health, which issues a binding opinion, because the positive data were not deemed sufficient and the Campania region did not achieve the planned targets, particularly on RSAs and cancer screening. A position that had immediately outraged the governor, who had also considered criminal as well as civil action, and it is not excluded that he will not go ahead on this front either.

The reason for the negative response from the Ministry of Health is in the fact 'that the law regulates the entry into the back plan of a region, but does not regulate the exit from the back plan,' the President of Campania maintains, considering the reason 'given to us by a Ministry manager, totally idiotic. This is another reason why 'we are still working in these hours to verify whether, in addition to the appeal to the TAR, we can denounce that ministry manager for concussion and also to report him to the Court of Auditors for the economic damage he is doing to the Campania health system,' he adds and emphasises: 'We are fighting.