When we talk about health, social and welfare services it is useful to refer to health and wellbeing. They are two concepts that significantly overlap and mutually interfere with each other, and are difficult to separate out even in our own lives. Health influences wellbeing and vice versa, and we do not know where health ends and wellbeing begins. Legally, politically and administratively, in organising and providing services, the distinction and the separating out is a necessary phase. However, when they have been separated out, they need to be brought back together again. The first separation of the two is in the Constitution, where protecting the right to health is different, more precise and detailed, while the protection of social rights is weaker. This formulation is linked to a work logic, a logic that has been important in history, but is now reductive in terms of universalism.only subscribers can see the full article

The welfare state is a polysemic idea and the various social sciences have given different definitions of it, each of them underlining this or that aspect, depending on the epistemological attitude of their field. In studies of the theory of the state and constitutional law, by «welfare state» we mean a liberal state that uses taxation to carry out policies that actively redistribute wealth so as to guarantee a minimum level of wellbeing to all citizens, whatever their capacity to produce income (Mortati, 1973): it is clearly a definition that corresponds to a historical-institutional perspective, which in the framework of the development of forms of the state underlines the transformation of the «neutral» liberal state, under the effect of mass parties and reforming political and union movements, into an «interventionist» state.only subscribers can see the full article