The latest scandal in healthcare, an incurable disease

The measure is full. Because we are not talking - as the national media naively and tenderly headline - about the new director of the Policlinico of Messina. Iacolino, under investigation by the Palermo prosecutors on charges of external complicity with the mafia and aggravated corruption, is instead - much more prosaically - the man to whom the Region has handed over the keys to Sicilian healthcare over the past four years. More of a political-manager than a manager-political, he has managed the fate of the sector that, draining half of the regional budget (the 48%, amounting to over 11 billion), tears at the skin of the most primordial right of Sicilians: health. Of the patients who are there, waiting in endless waiting lists, and of those who are no longer there, like Professor Gallo from Mazara.

Now, having set aside all the somewhat hypocritical formulas from the manual of guarantees, the investigation involving Iacolino (which includes a mafia boss from Agrigento, Trapani entrepreneurs linked to Messina Denaro, and a few other assorted schemers) reeks of mafia and freemasonry from a mile away. Yet, diverting our attention from reading the judicial documents, the feeling - as terrible as it is realistic - is that in this story Cosa Nostra is involved up to the marrow, but it might also not be. Yes, because in the umpteenth chapter of the Sicilian Criminal Novel, just like in all the recent ones, the absolute protagonist is a monster with a thousand faces and thus faceless: corruption.

It is the common denominator of all the parties in the Sicilian center-right; it is the pendulum that determines majority balances and reshuffles; it is the line on the resume of all (or almost all) those, politicians and bureaucrats, who are in charge: if you do not have at least a notice of guarantee for any form of corruption, then it means that, in Sicily, you are nobody. A disease so widespread that it has been downgraded to banal hypochondria. Thus yesterday, at the Ars, there was joy over the law on "Comiso city of peace" and people were indulging in discussions about the third term for mayors. As if nothing were wrong.

It is not so. In the majority, the game of backstabbing has already begun, to gain a few more seats from the troubles of allies; in the opposition, meanwhile, there is a competition to see who is more anti-mafia, dreaming of new revolutionary crocettisms, waiting to argue to lose while maintaining their little plots.

And instead, the real revolution would be normality. Of those who put the right people in the right places, of those who manage to keep wrongdoing out of the halls, of those who fully take on the responsibility of governing. Finding the right medicine for a disease that seems incurable.

Iacolino has been the master of Sicilian healthcare: has he really deceived everyone? Teresi, the regional official arrested, has been on trial for corruption since 2020: why was he still there? And why, scandal after scandal, do the same names of untouchables keep coming up who remain in their positions? Schifani, today, is trapped in a foul lazaretto. And he will not get out if he continues to use penicillin (suspensions, resignations, interim appointments, and commissions) to treat cancer. When the blame is always on others, then the treatment can become worse than the disease.