Mutual aid towards new frontiers: 'Ready to revise the rules'
Establishing the idkit of mutual organisations enhances their role and impact on the country system and welfare
Key points
To frame mutual aid societies in a cooperating ecosystem that sees supplementary healthcare increasingly at the centre. To revisit the norms without losing sight of the paradigm. To recognise the role (and impact) of the social economy in the country's system. These are just some of the ideas that emerged during the morning's work organised yesterday by Fimiv and Fondazione Terzjus, 'Le società di mutuo soccorso tra solidarietà e sussidiarietà' (Mutual aid societies between solidarity and subsidiarity).
The National Action Plan for the Social Economy
Spotlights, therefore, on the National Action Plan for the Social Economy. Which, for Antonio Chelli, president of Fimiv, in pursuing the objective of perimetering the subjects that populate such a vast sector - also identifying useful actions to accelerate its development - can be a turning point for the framework of mutual aid societies.
"The draft plan identifies the peculiarities of mutual aid societies (Sms), which, in the 2017 Third Sector Code, had remained in the background and needed clarification," he explained. "In this, the draft of the plan helps and meets many of our requests. In point 22, for example, it reiterates how Sms are Ets in their own right. A clarification that may seem pleonastic but often needs to be reiterated to avoid assimilation with profit-making companies. Or again in point 56, a distinction is made, for the first time at the regulatory level, between historical mutual aid societies, active in small communities, and health mutuals, with a broader range of action."
The revision of the standard
Non solo: nel testo, si accenna anche a un potenziale aggiornamento della legge istitutiva del mutuo soccorso (3818/1886), per rispondere all’evoluzione storica e sociale. «Siamo aperti a un confronto con istituzioni ed esperti per una rilettura della legge», ha chiarito Chelli, «un’operazione che non dovrà però mettere in dubbio i principi solidaristici che animano il mutuo soccorso, il patrimonio intergenerazionale (tenendo fermo il divieto di erogare il dividendo ai soci), la natura non commerciale e il principio della “porta aperta”». Basi di cui tenere conto anche nel contrasto alle «mutue spurie» che, operando in ambiti e con obiettivi diversi da quelli previsti, causano un danno reputazionale. Evitabile tanto con un’attività di vigilanza ministeriale efficace quanto definendo identità, quadro fiscale e missione degli enti mutualistici. Anche con strumenti come l’anagrafe della sanità integrativa, attiva da tempo, e un cruscotto in fase di sperimentazione nel
The Third Way
On the value of mutual aid in making up for the shortcomings of the health system, the Honourable Silvia Roggiani, a member of the Chamber's Fifth Budget Committee, urged: 'With respect to health and corporate welfare, we are struggling to get away from the logic of universalism entrusted to the public. Instead, there is a third way, mutual aid, which has as its priority the care of others and to which the State, focusing on subsidiarity, can entrust the management of collective needs when it cannot manage them'.
