Does welfare in Italy today remain true to constitutional precepts?
Prof. Canevaro: We can consider constitutional precepts as something that must be held on to. We can even consider them as a future to be built. Let us try to go towards that perspective. Our Constitution places labour as a fundamental element. Therefore, welfare has to be linked to the founding theme that is labour. Labour could consist in the meeting point of those who have a project and are passionate about it. They can create their project, their passion, and, at the same time, contribute to the common good. Some organizations are doing that, taking into consideration the different cycles of human experience, and also including the difference based on ageing. Organizations that create objects for a quality of life "despite" disability, despite ageing, etc., have an added-value for the market and contribute to the fulfilment of our Constitution. We could give other examples, including the building industry, which can anticipate special needs, and this way create a larger market. At the centre of all this is passion for one's own work, that not by chance becomes a contribution to the common good which is at the heart of the Constitution.
Prof. Mazzanti: Italy is the European Union's country which has the longest life expectancy at birth and, among large countries at the international level, it comes in second after Japan. This is the extraordinary result of a farsighted investment in our welfare model. The risk today is to fall back in previous models of welfare of corporate type that identified in the individual's work conditions the main gate of access to services. The challenge is to continue updating the answers to the needs in a coherent way with a universalistic vocation and rediscovering also the importance of the spontaneous organization of citizens in a Republic founded on labour.
Can the actual economic crisis lead to the redefinition of the concept of social equity itself?
Prof. Canevaro: It is the opportunity to do so. Social equity is the alliance of social, health, cultural and educational services, and of the social web. We need to try to outline, to profile the competent identity, which is an identity that connects, integrates. We need to be part of a larger group, overcoming categorization, in other words we need to do things in a way that a person with a disability, for example a deaf person, feels that she does not only belong to the deaf population. Let us go beyond this aspect, to realize that the sense of belonging of a deaf person is not linked only to deafness, but citizenship, and participation. Categories become part of a plural, competent identity, able even to organize itself in a social belonging.
It is important and fundamental to have needs
and competence meet. It means overcoming these mechanisms of assignment of
agents and subsidies who are now only busy establishing an hourly fee on
the basis of the possibility of spending, and not on the response to needs
which, if they were answered adequately, would allow the passage from
assistance to active citizenship, and from subjects with unearned income
to active and proactive subjects.
Prof.
Mazzanti: To avoid that the reduction of public funding result in the
automatic increase of unequal access to services, it is necessary to
introduce reforms in favour of equity. The greater incidence of private
spending for the acquisition of services creates in fact discrimination of
income, exclusion on the part of citizens, and greater inequity. For the
same resources used, it is necessary that the system of fiscal incentives
reinforce tools such as fiscal exemptions which in regards to deductions
are allowing us to move benefits in favour of lower income
brackets.
How is it possible to reconcile the necessity for
financial and accounting rigour with the fundamental rights of citizens?
Are there limits to insuperable cuts?
Prof. Canevaro:
It is said, and justly so, that if everyone paid their taxes, it
would be possible to be less heavily taxed. It is more important to do
things in a way that the tax burden be converted in traceable expenses.
Cuts without the traceability of an expense can lead to enormous risks.
And can lead to more spending. Virtuous dynamics is necessary. Let us
begin, for example, by professional outlines of teachers and, in
particular, teachers who have the specific duty of specialization by
integration. Let us not stop there: in parallel, let us try to have the
same attention for the figures of social educators, in other words the
professional figures already talked about who are not part of a health
system in a strict sense, it would make sense to call them education
professionals, as the decree by the then Health Minister Bindi had
indicated, making the distinction between social educators part of the
non-health sector strictly from an administrative point of view.
Certainly, the treatment of health, linked to quality of life, is not a
duty fulfilled only by health people but also by people in the social
sector. The health system interacts with the education system forming one
system only. It is interesting to use this way of expressing ourselves by
using the term health not in the strict pharmacological and medical sense,
but with the wider meaning of "taking care of" as in providing a
quality of life to people and society. We have to remind ourselves that
while "abilities" bear
a dimension that is basically individual, "competences" are social or
they are not.
Prof. Mazzanti: The proper administration of
public and private funds is a right of citizens to help them to have those
rights that they themselves in the democratic exercise identify as being
relevant. The funding of public expenses is part of the citizenship pact
and of an equilibrium in constant evolution. In general, for the
same public resources, relevant improvements in the offering of services
whether public or private would be available if in our country we could
create a greater organization of the demand of services on the part of
citizens.
Can interventions in favour of disabled people in
particular gain greater efficiency, paradoxically, as they are better
targeted because of the reduction of resources?
Prof.
Canevaro: Demand refers to a phenomenon that needs to be clarified.
The efficiency of the targeted intervention remains to be demonstrated. It
is useful to recall, to avoid the risks of specialism, the story of the
eye of the frog. The eye of the frog has a targeted specialty, and is
unable to see what does not move. What it can see is the slightest
movement. Even surrounded by dead flies, the frog can die of hunger if
there is not even some breeze to move the delicious food around allowing
it to see that. The perspective of inclusion cannot be reserved for a
category: it is open to all. It is an element that reinforces the
necessity that such a perspective should be taught in the basic training
of some professions, possibly the greatest number of professions. A closed
skill may cause damages which we may not see; or at least have such
defense that they are not comparable, out of any comparison and evaluation
on the part of those outside of the competence.
Prof.
Mazzanti: In itself, the reduction of resources poses the risk of
increasing the fragility of those who can obtain a minor benefit from the
economic resources. Such risk is still more relevant, if the major
specialization leads to abandoning the dimension of inclusion, with an
approach that loses sight of the advantage of inclusion in front of the
immediate and future disadvantage of segmentation and segregation. There
is space for innovative tools based on the principle of solidarity and
mutual assistance that take the shape of specific products and services
designed for disabled people, privately funded and integrated to actual
public services.