New chapter in the clash between Italy and Switzerland for the payment of the medical expenses of those injured in the Crans-Montana fire on New Year’s Eve. The Canton of Valais has second thoughts: it will not be able to cover the 108 thousand euros in healthcare costs incurred by the Sion hospital for the care provided, for a few hours, to four Italian children, one more than previously known. Therefore, Switzerland will ask Italy to pay the bill. And Meloni and Tajani have already responded: it won’t happen.
What’s happening between Switzerland and Italy
Thus relations between Rome and Bern become tense again. “I understand from press reports that the Swiss authorities intend to ask Italy to pay the medical expenses that the Sion hospital would have incurred for the hospitalization, even for a few hours, of some children injured in the Crans-Montana fire – writes the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, in a post on Facebook – If this ignoble request were to be formalised, I announce right now that Italy will reject it and will not give it any follow-up. I trust in the sense of responsibility of the Swiss authorities and I hope that the news turns out to be completely unfounded”.
After expensive invoices were sent to families ‘by mistake’, the new twist in this surreal health accounting affair emerged today in a meeting between the Italian ambassador to Bern, Gian Lorenzo Cornado, and the president of Valais, Mathias Reynard, head of the health department. “It seems to me that it is obvious that we are not paying”, replies the Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani. “The responsibility lies only with those who managed that place and those who did not have the checks carried out. There is no Italian responsibility”, reiterated the deputy prime minister.
What happens now
What seemed clear is no longer clear. And to get out of this bureaucratic, as well as diplomatic, impasse, the administrative path remains: resorting to the federal Department of the Interior, responsible for health matters, to try to agree on a solution at a bilateral level from the point of view of reciprocity, which also takes into account Italy’s economic commitments in favor of Switzerland.
What is certain, the Italian ambassador repeats, is that “the Italian State will never bear the costs of the care provided for just a few hours to our children who were poisoned or burned and who suffered and are condemned to suffer due to the irresponsibility of the managers of the place, where the emergency exits had been blocked and of the municipal and cantonal authorities who should have carried out or ordered the checks and did not do so”.
This is echoed by the lawyer Fabrizio Ventimiglia, lawyer for the family of a girl injured at the Constellation: “Here we are not faced with an ordinary hospitalization, but with the consequences of a very serious event in relation to which, according to the first results of the investigations, serious and repeated profiles emerge of failure to comply with the safety regulations also on the part of the institutions and at multiple levels. Transforming all this into a game of spin between health systems is a stretch that does not stand up either legally or, above all, on the plan of equity”.