  Italy and the Eurozone are heading in the year 2012 into a financial
depression of unprecedented magnitude, with a forthcoming multitude of often
contradictory public economic and financial stability emergency interventions
whose ultimate endogenous and exogenous effects on public and private health
spending and on the sustainability of universal coverage are difficult to
predict ex ante. The research question is to assess whether it is possible to
synthesise into a single and simple quantitative index such multitude of public
economic and financial stability interventions and assess their magnitude and
direction towards increasing or decreasing sustainability of publicly funded
health care and universal coverage. We have analyzed the Italian Economic and
Stability Reform Program 2011-2014 and we have proposed a quantitative
synthetic sustainability index {\sigma} based on simple partial and absolute
differential equations. The sustainability index {\sigma} highlights that in
case the growth of the GDP in the period 2011-2014 be insufficient - as is
already the case in the first semester of 2012 - all the assumptions on which
the Italian Economic and Stability Reform Program 2011-2014 rests will fall,
and Universal Coverage will become unsustainable. Health and Public Health
professionals should intervene immediately with Italian and Eurozone national
budgets planners and financial health regulators before unselective exogenously
induced health financing and provision shortages produce irreparable
epidemiological effects.
