Livelli essenziali, standard ospedalieri e riduzione dei posti letto: note a margine della sentenza della Corte n. 231 del 2017, rileggendo la n. 125 del 2015

[Machine translation] With paragraph no. 231/2017, the Constitutional Court declared art. 1, paragraph 541, lett. a) of law no. 208/2015, illegitimate on the reduction of hospital beds. According to the Court, this provision reproduces the rule referred to in art. 15, paragraph 13, lett. c) of Decree-Law no. 95/2012 (conv. l. 135/2012), already declared unconstitutional by judgment no. 125/2015, in the part where applicable to the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano. The 2017 decision draws attention to a problem that, on closer inspection, already emerged from the previous one in 2015, namely the effects of the ruling on the legitimacy of the regulation on hospital standards (Ministerial Decree 70/2015) which finds its legislative basis in the aforementioned art. 13. The examination of this problem and of the relationship between the two decisions calls for some critical considerations regarding the concept of the LEA expressed in decision no. 125/2015 and highlights the importance of clarifying the not always straight vision that a constitutional judge shows of the institution of essential levels in health.