Lombardy Region gets stuck on wrong accounts

Rome, 10 Oct – “The sports medicine unit is based on a service aimed at citizenship that provides for the issue of certification for competitive sports fitness with total exemption from payment for all underage athletes and for those who are affected by disabilities”. This is how the General Welfare Directorate of the Lombardy Region Council clarifies. The budget made available by the Region is exhausted and Lombard minors, without a certificate, will no longer be able to carry out competitive sports or even train.
“Lombardy Region has announced that it does not want to integrate the resources intended for the reimbursement of medical-sports visits. This is what ATS Città di Milano reported without leaving room for dialogue, while the endowment of the fund is exhausted “explains Stefano Massaro, CEO Cerba HealthCare Italia, who continues:” on the one hand, all athletes are obliged to undergo a specialist examination to be able to practice sport, on the other hand, access to the service is blocked due to a gross error in the planning of shopping ».
The anticipated exhaustion of funds in the Lombard sports medicine budget was not caused by an unpredictable increase in requests for services, but by the lack of funds for the extra activity carried out by the health facilities due to Covid For more than a year, in fact, the General Welfare Directorate of the Lombardy Region Council has established that underage sportspeople do not need any medical prescription to be entitled to the exemption from the post Covid-19 visit to a sports medicine facility and that the diagnostic investigations, among those provided by the Ministry, considered by the medical assessor of suitability as necessary for the issue of the suitability certification must also be performed under the exemption regime. “All additional services deemed necessary and mandatory in response to the health emergency of recent years, for which, however, the Lombardy Region has not provided for any budget increase” concludes Stefano Massaro.In a circular from the Welfare Directorate General it was written that the progress of the activity and any critical issues would be subject to specific monitoring which, evidently, was not punctual and eroded the budget of the Lombard unit of sports medicine. «The way to remedy this“ forgetfulness ”is certainly not to deny the performances to our children. I am sure that President Fontana and Councilor Moratti will agree with me, just as I am sure that by sitting urgently around a table we will quickly find a solution that does not oblige underage athletes and athletes with disabilities to pay for their certificates of fitness or to give up the practice. sporty. Our estimates on the projection of demand, with agendas booked until November without the support of the funds, indicate that between now and the end of the year our facilities would need just over 650 thousand euros to guarantee access to sports for children who turn to our centers. Cerba HealthCare Italia, which with its diagnostic facilities is the main reference for Lombard athletes (100,000 every year), is available to work together with the Lombardy Region to find a solution that does not pass by closing the agendas ».«For this reason I invite the president Attilio Fontana and the commissioner Letizia Moratti to convene an urgent working table to focus on the critical issues and identify immediate solutions. I think that this issue is certainly more important than any electoral misunderstanding: you cannot force children to visit before playing sport and then not guarantee it. To date we have no solutions other than demanding payment or closing agendas, but it is the Lombardy Region that tells us that it wants to abdicate and that it wants to transform Sports Medicine into a Private Service and no longer into a Public Service. Too often we see the controversy between public and private health without hitting the real heart of the question: the service is public if supported by public funding, private if paid by the citizen. The service provider can only remain a spectator ».