Also due to Covid, in 2021 over half of Italian families (50.2%) gave up health services due to economic problems, unavailability of the service or inadequacy of the offer.
At the same time, household spending on health, care for the elderly and education has increased.
The gap between the growth in demand and the adequacy of the offer is the novelty of the 2022 edition of the Cerved welfare report for Italian families presented today in Rome.
According to the report, the number of families who have given up on welfare benefits has increased: 50.2% in healthcare, 56.8% in care for the elderly, 58.4% in childcare, 33.8% in 'instruction.
In the last year, more than half of the families gave up on healthcare services and in 13.9% of cases these were significant ones.
56.8% (22% significantly) gave up on aged care services, and 58.4% (17.4% significantly) gave up childcare and preschool education services.
Three main reasons affect renunciations: for health, the pandemic has caused restrictions in the availability of health services and postponement of treatment by the citizens themselves for fear of contagion. A second reason for renunciation is economic, and concerns the difficulty in bearing the cost of the services. But for the most part the main reasons concern the inadequacy of the offer. This is evident in the care of the elderly: more than 60% of families give up these services, judging them to be of insufficient quality or due to unavailable services.
The survey was conducted on a sample of 4,005 families from all Italian regions, stratified by economic condition and by composition of the family unit. The surveys were carried out in different phases over the last two years, from the spring 2020 lockdown to November 2021, to analyze the influence of the Covid emergency on family behavior and to distinguish the consequences of the emergency from long-term trends.
According to the report, the family, with all its difficulties, remains the primary network of social protection, solidarity between genders and generations, the education of children and support for the social mobility of young people.
The sore point of the relationship between services and the new family structure is represented by the growing number of elderly people who do not find an adequate response in the welfare system: four million elderly people, 28.9% of the total, live alone and families with elderly or with other people in need of help they are 6.5 million.
In 67.3% of these, assistance is provided exclusively by family members, without the aid of services.
In 2021, Italian families spent 136.6 billion on welfare benefits, over 5 thousand euros per family
, equal to 17.5% of net income.
This is what emerges from the Cerved 2022 welfare report for Italian families presented in Rome in the presence of the minister for equal opportunities and the Elena Bonetti family.
The report analyzes the welfare expenditure of families, 136.6 billion in 2021, equal to 7.8% of GDP, recording an increase in expenditure on health (38.8 billion), assistance for the elderly (29.4 billion) and education (12.4 billion, while those for childcare (6.4 billion), family assistance (11.2 billion), culture and leisure (5.1 billion)
are down. Above all, the change in family structures to generate new needs, increasing the gap with the supply: change in lifestyles and family relationship models; fragmentation of family structures; impact on the family of the aging of the population.
The expenditure for welfare services, equal to 5,317 euros per family, has an incidence of 17.5% on the net family income which, in 2021, was on average 30,434 euros.
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