ABSTRACT
The health care system in Italy is broadly similar to the health care systems elsewhere in Europe. The Italians spend approximately the same proportion of the GDP on health care as do the British. Life expectancy in Italy is slightly higher than in Britain for both women and men. Increasing life expectancy has presented Italy with exactly the same kind of problems that all the advanced industrial countries are having to address, that is, a growing demand for health care from an increasing elderly population. Italy also shares the problem of inflation in the cost of health care which is constantly several percentage points higher than general inflation. An increasingly elderly population is certainly one cause of this phenomenon. Another is the growing utilisation of high-tech medicine within large centralised hospitals at the expense of low-tech community-based medicine. Alongside these universal problems, Italy also has to suffer a number of problems which appear uniquely Italian.
