New tensions between Italy and Switzerland after the Crans-Montana fire: Rome refuses to pay the invoices issued for the hospitalization of the Italian victims. “An insult, an inhuman bureaucracy”
Italy will not pay the bills of its citizens hospitalized in Switzerland following the Crans-Montana fire, even if the health insurance of the Swiss Confederation requests it, the Italian ambassador in Bern, Gian Lorenzo Cornado, said on Friday. The hospital in Sion (Valais) sent the Italian state three invoices totaling 109,000 euros “for a single day of hospitalization on January 1,” the ambassador told the Journal du Tessin.
The Italian ambassador in Switzerland considers these sums “absolutely exorbitant” and assures that “they will have to be covered either by LAMal (Swiss health insurance, no), or by the canton of Valais, but in no case by the families, nor by the Italian state”, according to the Swiss newspaper, Journal du Tessin, quoted by News.ro.
The fire at the Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana, on New Year's Eve 2026, resulted in 41 deaths, including six Italians, and 115 injured.
“A bilateral solution”
During a meeting that took place on Friday with the president of the canton of Valais, Mathias Reynard, the Italian ambassador assured that “the Italian state will never bear the costs of the medical care provided for just a few hours to our young people who were poisoned or burned and who suffered because of the irresponsibility of the local administrators, where the emergency exits had been blocked, as well as the communal and cantonal authorities who should have carried out or ordered checks and did not did it”.
The president of the government of Valais suggested, according to his own statements, to contact the Swiss Department of the Interior, competent in the field of health, to “find a bilateral solution” based on the principle of reciprocity, considering that two Swiss patients were hospitalized for months in a hospital in Milan without being billed.
Diplomatic incident
The Italian ambassador had already been recalled to Rome for several weeks, his government protesting the release of the bar manager and calling for a joint investigation team.
Bills were sent to patients “for information purposes”, without them being obliged to pay them, according to the Law on Medical Insurance (LAMal).
The head of the Italian government, Giorgia Meloni, condemned these bills on Tuesday X as “an insult, but also a farce, which only an inhuman bureaucracy could produce”.
It is “a new source of tension” between Switzerland and Italy in relation to this tragedy, the ambassador commented on Friday, hoping that “the problem can be solved without additional problems” with the involvement of the Confederation.
