In the course of the fourth Covid wave, we reaffirmed - if there was any need - the disaster of territorial health care. publicsuper-conscientious but overburdened and unreachable -or on the run- general practitioners, no support, stressed or non-existent Usca, do-it-yourself tampons, the bricolage of self-care. And every other health problem neglected and postponed sine die. Almost every family has experienced the problem up close. A stress test that brought to light the accumulated problems of years and years of bad public health policy practices.
At the moment few signs of a trend reversal: we talk about "health houses and of community hospitals - in 'excellent' Lombardy, for example, we are still in the process of finding suitable land and buildings - but in the meantime private multi-specialist centres are springing up everywhere like mushrooms. who have apparently already found land and buildings, which is a good indication of the direction in which they are moving. A two-way street: obstacles, bottlenecks and delays for public intervention, rapidity of private initiative. Business is not wrong, it is betting on the fact that the health crisis will never be resolved and is consolidating investment in 'care' as a business between private professionals and private citizens.
A great heritage, that of our public health, the last traces of which are melting away like snow in the sun.
If it is true, as we have always said, that care is first and foremost a relationship of which drugs and diagnostic tools are mere instruments -relationship between the patient and the therapist, between the 'sick' organ and the rest of the body, between healthy and sick, between the patient and his or her contexts, between places of life and places of care -. its paradigm cannot be represented by the commercial agreement between a 'dysfunctional' individual and an invoicing professional.
There will be no more true public and territorial healthcare without a radical transformation of this paradigm.
Care and recognition of mutual dependence are the founding principles of any human community, whose primary purpose has always been to come together to ensure closeness, support, protection and help. But Today, the exchange value - money - has completely overridden these primary values.
In the world we are living in profit determines everything, without any countervailing principles. Perhaps money has never mattered so much in human history. A real "neo-feudalism'. (Shoshana Zuboff) which sees exponentially increase the number of poor people and, in unison, the dividends of the richest companies ever. In particular the hi-tech companies of Silicon Valley ex-hippies. During the pandemic Jeff Bezos of Amazon has earned a volume of capital gains equivalent to what would have to be spent to ensure 3 doses of vaccine for all the inhabitants of the Earth.
It cannot, therefore, simply be a matter of patching up local health care with some compassionate trompe-l'oeil for the 'poor'. Even when we talk about healthcare, It is a question of the change in civilisation that we have been discussing for some time, bringing back to the centre the two of the relationship, understood as an indivisible atom, instead of the fiction of a perfectly self-sufficient individual, free of all ties and armed with ever new rights. This refoundation should be inspired by the gratuitousness and the indispensability of the relationship between mother and daughter-o.
It is, in short, a revolution as it has always been understood by most of the world's women: a symbolic transformation that is irresistible and can no longer be postponed.
It is, as he wrote Luisa Muraro (At the market for happiness) of that maternal power that "becomes a principle of civilisation at the disposal of human coexistence.".
This is why health and care - of which we have so much experience over thousands of years - must once again be placed at the heart of our thinking and our practices..
Marina Terragni
