Resumen de L'efficienza dei sistemi sanitari regionali in Italia: pubblico o privato?

Greta Falavigna, Roberto Ippoliti

• The paper sets out to analyze the efficiency of regional health care systems based on the patients' perception of the quality of the services provided. For the purpose of this study, efficiency is measured as interregional mobility, i.e., the number of a region's residents that use the services of the regional health care system (positive mobility) and the number of non-regional patients that travel specifically to the host region to benefit from its medical care (negative mobility). Given the widespread take-up of social networks, the study assumes that people are willing to travel to areas where the quality of medical care is perceived to be higher. The first step was to perform a data envelopment analysis to obtain the efficiency scores. The second step consisted of conducting a regression analysis to respond to the paper's main research question: to what extent might the public sector play a role in the efficiency of regional health care systems? The empirical evidence suggests that the privatization process of regional health care systems has failed to raise the efficiency of these particular suppliers in terms of the patients' perception of the quality of their medical treatments.