Almost 40 thousand doctors fled abroad: huge tax cuts to convince them to return

In five years, almost 40 thousand white coats have left Italy in search of better working conditions and salaries. Now the National Health Service, dealing with a serious shortage of doctors, which emerged tragically during the pandemic and exacerbated by their unstoppable flight abroad, wants to try to play the card of their return home. To convince them, we are thinking of a huge tax discount on incomes like the one already experienced for the return of brains to Italy

The maxi tax discount for gowns returning to Italy

To convince doctors who have fled abroad to return to Italy where there are among the lowest salaries in the EU, the Minister of Health Orazio Schillaci He has an idea and has put his technicians to study it: the plan is to replicate what has already been experimented with teachers and researchers for white coats. In fact, a huge discount of up to 90% on taxes is already in force for them: in the tax period in which the residence is transferred and in the following five, the emoluments received contribute to the formation of income from employment or self-employment to the extent of 10%. percent. A measure that Minister Schillaci would now also like to extend to Italian doctors who have gone abroad en masse in recent years, the idea in fact is to try to attract at least some of the escaped scrubs

The difference in wages weighs heavily on the escape

The technicians are working to ground the measurement and are studying the numbers: in this sense help comes from the “census” recently carried out by the Fnomceo (the Order of Doctors) which estimates an audience of around 39 thousand doctors who went to abroad between 2019 and 2023, of which 11 thousand only from 2022 to 2023. What convinces them to pack their bags and leave Italy are above all the higher salaries which reach on average, remaining in Europe, 60 thousand euros more per year year with a maximum of 205 thousand euros more in Luxembourg, 110 thousand in Iceland and Holland, 100 thousand in Denmark, Ireland and Germany.

Patriarca: «The coverage of the measure is a false problem»

The measure will obviously have to pass the scrutiny of the Ministry of Economy, but as he underlines Annarita Patriarca (Fi) who in Parliament was the first to put forward the idea of the return of doctors in a question time: «the question of financial coverage is an easily solvable problem if not even a false problem. Doctors who may be interested in returning to Italy and, therefore, benefiting from the Irpef discount of up to 90% in fact already do not pay taxes in our country and therefore would not require any budget to cover it. Indeed, their return would on the contrary represent an additional surplus for the state coffers.” «It is clear – continues Patriarca – that my proposal, which was accepted and embraced by Minister Schillaci, can also be adopted in a limited time frame, in order to help the national health system to recover human resources capable of dealing with the crisis that is affecting Italian hospitals”.