About two years ago, the WHO evaluated our National Health System as the second, in the world, for the quality of the services provided to the citizen. The widespread diffusion of general practitioners, general paediatricians, the presence of hospitals and first aid facilities even in less populated villages, the use of resources (apart from the inevitable distortions linked to the greed of human nature which one should never tire of pointing out), has allowed us Italians to become the country with the highest life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality rate in the western world. Only in France, at that time, was a better health system active than the Italian one. However, since the average expenditure per citizen in that country was much higher, our SSN represented an absolutely cutting-edge model in the world.
The need to contain current spending, which after years of nonchalance has seen our public debt rise enormously, together with the budgetary constraints imposed by Europe, has forced robust cuts in spending that could not fail to affect the resources allocated to health as well. This has produced a significant decrease in the quality of services provided to patients.
Together with other initiatives aimed at saving resources, our legislators have imposed the introduction of the generic drug through a system that allows a drug to be considered equivalent to the original (patented) even if a difference of 20% is highlighted between them. Furthermore, this legal presumption of equivalence has never been clinically highlighted (although the pharmacist often does not use the equivalent term but "they are the same") because the equivalence refers to the active ingredient, not to the set of other components and to the pharmaceutical technology which in the end allow that product to be considered a drug in all respects, therefore covered by the relative patent.
On the other hand, the fact that the generic is not the exact copy of the drug to which it refers is sometimes discovered at their own expense by the users themselves. Powders that do not dissolve, empty capsules, lack of efficacy, an increase in adverse reactions, sometimes even serious ones, as reported by the doctors of the emergency aids. Unfortunately, these episodes also occur more frequently in hospitals that buy with low tenders and in which, a
