Medically Assisted Suicide and the Crisis of the National Healthcare System: A Brief Bioethical Analysis of the Italian Case

This paper investigates the intersection between medically assisted suicide (MAS) and the structural crisis of Italy’s National Healthcare Service (NHS). Triggered by recent Constitutional Court rulings, which both confirm strict eligibility criteria and stress the importance of procedural safeguards within the NHS, the analysis explores how systemic deficiencies - staff shortages, organizational inefficiencies, and limited access to palliative care - impair the practical realization of MAS. These shortcomings, the paper argues, point to a broader erosion of biomedical ethics, increasingly replaced by market-oriented logics within both public and private healthcare. In the absence of national legislation on MAS, this ethical and institutional gap highlights the urgency of reform to ensure equitable end-of-life care and uphold patient self-determination.