Italy: A Strange NHS with Its Paradoxes

Abstract

In the last 20 years the Italian National Health Care System (NHS) has experienced a significant process of transformation. The NHS was introduced in 1978 substituting a previous Social Health Care Insurance model (Vicarelli, 2011). While the 1980s represented a decade when governments tried to implement the new institutional design for health care, the 1990s were already a time of discernible change: at the beginning of the decade, for a series of reasons that will be explained later in this chapter, attempts were made to dismiss the NHS and shift to a more private-like system. These attempts failed but important transformations took place nevertheless (Vicarelli, 2011).