Abandoning partial narratives to move to action. This is the message launched in Rome during the event “Out of the box”, promoted by the newborn community Welfare Nest Plus.
«How is supplementary health? » is the question from which the intervention of Damiana Mastantuono, CEO of Welfare Nest, Italian benefit company specialized in strategic consultancy and advisory for welfare and supplementary health. The company, which daily accompanies health funds, mortgages, mutual aid companies, enterprises and entities towards a common, sustainable and innovative evolution, has analyzed the “state of health” of the sector. According to the manager, in fact, “The supplementary health today lives a contradiction between waiting and innovation, inside a partial and incomplete narrative, built for successive stratifications more than by shared design”.
Behind this fragmentation is actually a rich story, made of different worlds – bilaterality, mutuality, insurance and healthcare providers – that have long been cooperating in support of the National Health Service. Reality that possess internal specificities that today more than ever is important to preserve and not flatten.
Mastantuono’s opening work has also designed the frame of the three panels that have happened during the day: the great challenges of the sector and the proposals for the future; the protection of non-workers; the transformations of the insurance market, mutualism and health funds.
Drawing the course on the great future challenges, the CEO has clarified that the sector does not reject a regulation, but it disputes the ways of implementation dropped from above: ‘The supplementary health does not reject the rules: it hopes, because they can guarantee a clearer development of the sector. What we fear is the method of taxation from above. For this reason participation is not a detail, but the heart of our method”.
For Mastantuono, the time has come to transform the complaint into intervention, recognizing the supplementary health a multidimensional nature. The risk to be avoided is that of a reform which, in the name of only apparent simplification, cancels today’s most mature and significant experiences. A concrete example of this regulatory shortcircuit has been identified in Article 29 of Decree-Law 19/2026: in the worthy attempt to promote transparency, the norm has ended up generating complexity and uncertain application that could have been avoided.
The debate has then expanded to protect the so-called “great excluded”, i.e. non-workers, today on the margins of a system based mainly on corporate bilaterality. On the subject, Mastantuono called for a net change: “The theme of non-workers certainly requires incentives and openings from bilateral health. But the solution cannot be discharged only on bilaterality: it is necessary to rethink the model and the potential of open funds, mutuality and doc funds”. From here the proposal to evaluate territorial and regional initiatives, up to compulsory models for non-autosufficiency (LTC).
The analysis also intercepted the profound changes in the market, where insurance, mortgages and health funds are becoming real direct dispensers of care and not simple intermediaries; an ecosystem phenomenon that should not be demonized, but monitored to avoid concentration risks.
In order to respond to these dynamics and offer a real space of comparison between operators, institutions and industry, Welfare Nest has promoted the birth of the Community of Welfare Nest Plus in its activities. This project with a strong eco-system vocation, six months after its debut, already unites about 40 members among market operators, dispensers, health funds, assistance cases and mutual aid companies.
“Our proposal wants to add to the existing ones, not to replace them but to integrate them bringing on the table a different tone of voice and a new method. Our goal is to enrich the realities already active in the field and to the basis of this there is the idea of a community of practice dedicated to the field of supplementary health, which can unite funds and market to build a common narrative. »
Damiana Mastantuono, CEO Welfare Nest
During the evening the new “Magazine di Sanità Integrativa” was presented, a six-month magazine designed to tell the excellence of the sector through a fresh visual language and direct testimonies. The instrument, also aimed at a public outside the sector, was born with the aim of fostering the encounter between all subjects in the field to grow together.
Mastantuono closed his intervention by inviting a step change in the narrative of supplementary health, for which it is essential that print and collaborate sector find a common language oriented to the citizen. The ambition is to get out of the sensationalistic narrative that has characterized the last years to enhance the growth of a sector that from now on intends to evolve, just as the motto of the event itself says, “out of the box”.
The article Supplementary Health, Mastantuono (Welfare Nest): “It’s time for proposals, the Welfare Nest Plus community is born” from IlNewyorkese.