Elenka Brenna

Rich and Well Educated: Are These Requirements Necessary to Claim Healthcare Tax Credits in Italy?

BackgroundThe paper investigates the use of healthcare tax credits (HTCs) in Italy through the analysis of a panel data, which provides information on individual income tax from 2008 to 2014. There is evidence of disparities in the per-capita HTCs between Northern and Southern regions, which need to be analyzed and addressed.ObjectiveThe aim of the paper is to investigate the socioeconomic determinants in the use of Healthcare Tax Credits in Italy.MethodsA fixed effects Ordinary Least Square model is run to analyze the impact of selected socioeconomic variables on regional per capita HTCs, with a particular focus on the role of education.ResultsThe results corroborate literature findings on the regressive effects of HTCs; they also provide highlights on the role of education in explaining the distribution of HTCs among Italian regions.ConclusionPublic money is reimbursed to regions where people are, on average, richer and better educated. More equitable objectives could be reached by allocating the same resources in the provision of services covered by the NHS.

To what extent is long-term care representative of elderly care? A case study of elderly care financing in Lombardy, Italy

The ageing of European population has been rapidly increasing during the last decades, and the problem of elderly care financing has become an issue for policy-makers. Long-term care (LTC) financing is considered a suitable proxy of the resources committed to elderly care by each government, but the preciseness of this approximation depends on the extent to which LTC is representative of elderly care within each country. Since there is a broad heterogeneity in LTC funding, organization and setting among European States, it is difficult to find a common parameter representing the public resources destined to the elderly care. We address these topics employing as a case study an Italian region, Lombardy, which in terms of population, dimension, healthcare organization and economic development could be compared to other European countries. The method we suggest, which consists basically in a careful estimate of all the public resources employed in the provision of services exclusively destined to the elderly, could be applied, with the due differences, to other European countries or regions.

Cross-Border Mobility in Italy: Some Considerations in Response to the Recent Commentaries.

The paper “Regional incentives and patient cross-border mobility” received three commentaries, each adopting a different perspective on patients’ mobility issue. Starting with Neri,1 the author deeply examines the paper, by considering and commenting each step of the analysis. He notably addresses the main points of the manuscript, highlighting the importance of the institutional framework in which the cross-border mobility (CBM) is considered,